Tails of Brave Adventure
by Shax Davis
Summary: Tails Prower searches for meaning in a cruel and unwelcoming world. His search takes him across the sea and around the globe, but his most perilous journey will be within.
1. Retrospect

TAILS OF BRAVE ADVENTURE  
S Peter Davis

All characters (C) SEGA, Archie and SP Davis 2006.  
Used without permission  
Apologies about the screw-up with the beginning of this chapter. Fixed now.

---

This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
He was on a gurney, but he couldn't see who was pushing him. His head was a drugged-down lump of lead on a rubber neck, he couldn't move an inch. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling marched past his vision as he floated along the hallway in a white bed. The people around him had no faces. No... they were wearing masks. Blank, white masks. Dozens of eyes stared down at him and he tried to speak but he couldn't. He wasn't even sure he was making a sound, because his ears didn't work. The world was a reel of film without a soundtrack.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
To understand how he had arrived in this situation was a futile effort. He couldn't remember. His past was a blur to him as a dream becomes vague and incorporeal upon waking. The mountains... ah, but even they were slipping away into that dark abyss, now. Besides, what relevance did the past hold when his present was what it was? His quest was surely lost. He had failed his family and himself. His failure was utter and total. It didn't matter what became of him, now.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
Now he was in a room... a white, sterile room without windows. He watched the masked people above him as they handed various silvery instruments back and forth to one another. They were all wearing rubber gloves and blue plastic coats. He was completely paralysed, unable to do anything but watch, but nevertheless he could feel his flesh creep underneath his skin as he was lifted onto a white table, a soft pillow slipped under his head. A bright light was switched on above him.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
One of the faceless strangers stood over him and held up something that glinted in the light. He knew his father had died in vain. There was no justifying his life, which had been so fleeting and pointless that he couldn't even remember it by the end. He tried to say this; he tried to announce that it didn't matter what they did with him now that his purpose had been terminated, because without his destiny he was just a sack of rotting meat in a freak's shell. But he couldn't speak. The drugs had numbed him. He could only lie in wait.  
Tails was awake and watching when the scalpel came down.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end; but this was how it began.

---

**RETROSPECT**

---

**10:00 am**

Tails Prower stood alone in the pine forest. A breeze blew back his fur and rustled the pine needles, and this was the only sound. The forest was empty, and so too was his mind.  
_How did I get here?_  
He frowned and shook his head. How very strange. He seemed to have lost his train of thought.  
(you've lost a little more than that, buckaroo)  
Through the trees up ahead, he could see buildings. Just a glimpse. Two white towers stretched overhead. It must have been Joe's airport... finally, he had arrived. He couldn't wait to greet his old friend, sit down for a meal and talk about current events and planes. He could see the goal ahead of him... so why did he feel so lost?  
"Overdraw," he said aloud. The word was lodged in his brain like a splinter. He looked down and realised he was holding something. A little gold-painted toy, made of iron or something stronger. There was a key in its back. Why did this look so familiar to him? Where had he picked it up?  
"Okay, get yourself together, Tails. Keep your eyes on the finish line. Keep your mind on the quest."  
It had been four months since Tails had parted company with his uncle Tyler. They had travelled together for a few weeks through the Westerican plains north of the Great Forest, but Tails hadn't followed his uncle all the way to Catilina. Speaking with Tyler at length about his father and his legacy, he had come upon an insight as to his own purpose in life.  
Tails had left the Freedom Fighters because he did not belong with their cause. With Sonic gone, he felt about as useful as a shovel after the handle has fallen off. There was no meaning in what he did in the Great Forest. Tails had learned of a place where his actions would have meaning, where he could truly make a difference for good; This place existed over the ocean. It was his birthplace. The Kitsune Atole.  
Over a decade ago, Trevor Prower had made a vow to the people of the Atole, _his_ people, that they would return to free them some day from the tyranny they endured. This was his promise, one that he would never get to honour. Instead, he laid down his life for his son, far away from home.  
Tails, in turn, became the inheritor of this promise. He swore to take on his father's burden, to honour the vow he had made, and to return to his people, to set them free. This was his responsibility as his father's son. This was his destiny. This was truly to be _his_ quest, not Sonic's, not the Freedom Fighters'. He couldn't allow his father's death to be in vain, as it surely was for every moment that Tails spent fighting for a cause that was not his own.  
Tails had spent the past quarter of a year preparing himself for what he was about to undertake. He settled in a town called Point Adrien on the north side of the Great Forest, and there he lived, performing odd jobs here and there, building up some savings with which he could purchase the things he needed for his journey. It seemed he had forgotten what it was like to live in the public eye - he had forgotten the disgusted looks and snide laughter that he attracted from strangers. In New Knothole, everyone had known him, everyone had been comfortable. Here, he became a novelty again. The weird mutant kid. When he spoke to people, often they would conspicuously avert their eyes, or worse, reply very slowly and smile a lot as though an extra tail meant that he suffered some kind of mental deficiancy. People were such idiots. Tails didn't much enjoy his short sojourn into the outside world, but he did begin to feel already as though he were truly making a difference. When the time came to leave Point Adrien, he packed his supplies for a long hike into the Kirandul Range.  
That was where he stood now.  
The Kitsune Atole lay over the ocean and his only method of reaching it was stored in a hangar deep within the mountains. Flightless Joe, the eccentric hermit and aerial enthusiast, with far too much money to know what to do with it all, lived in seclusion in a mountaintop airport along with his vast collection of flying machines. Tails' journey would take him there, and then straight on to his destiny.  
But something had gone awry somewhere along the way. Tails stood without his pack, he couldn't remember where he'd left it. All he had was this strange gold statue. Joe's airport was up ahead of him, and yet he didn't dare approach. It felt wrong, somehow.  
Tails had images in his head. He didn't know what that meant. Something about hiking through these mountains had apparently thrown him into a temporary state of insanity. He _hoped_ it was temporary. He didn't want to see these images forever. He didn't want to see the black squid flying over the trees. He didn't want to see the ugly talon clutching at his shoulder. These things were madness to him. He didn't want to see the wolves spreading their wings for him to see. It was not an image for a sane mind to hold.  
Now he stood in silence without any insight into his own recent past. He'd lost some time, he didn't know how much, but it was enough for him to have lost his belongings and acquired this strange statue. He looked at it, dumbfounded. He rattled it with absent ignorance, like a simpleton trying to rediscover fire.  
It was now that he became aware of a presence around him. He wasn't alone in this forest anymore. He felt watched from every angle, surrounded. Ambushed.  
There was nowhere he could run. Even if he tried to make it to the buildings up ahead, he knew they would catch him before he got anywhere. Trapped by his own confusion, he did nothing, merely awaited the inevitable. He dropped the metal toy in the grass, where it lay upside-down and motionless.  
People were walking out from behind the trees. Each of them a dark silhouette against the long shadows of early morning. They were all dressed the same, in dark uniforms with large helmets and powerful guns strapped to their chests. Dozens of them, all heavily armed, as though it would require an entire army to take him down. Every one of the soldiers had a beak. They each aimed their weapon at Tails from a distance and waited.  
Somebody else was stepping out from the foliage and approaching him with crisp, slow footsteps. Pine cones crunched loud under the stranger's feet. Another bird, though he didn't wear any helmet and instead bore a crest of dark plumage upon his scalp like a ceremonial headdress.  
"It's over, yes?" the stranger said, and held out one winged hand as though a peace offering. Tails knew it was anything but.  
"This isn't the way it was supposed to end," he replied, forlorn.  
"This is the way it _always_ ends. There is no escape from us, do you understand? You are so far below us that we tread you beneath our feet, yes?"  
The strangers from the forest led Tails away in chains, and he wept for the entire journey. His cause was lost before it even began. This was not the way it was supposed to end.

---

**9:43 am**

He sat on a log and rested his head in his hands. He thought about the journey that lay ahead of him and smiled. Would his father be proud of him, to know what Tails was doing in his honour? Would Sonic be proud to know that the young boy he had loved and protected for so long had grown into an adult, and was walking in his footsteps? He sighed, and wished they were all still around to see him take up his destiny.  
There was movement ahead of him, and Tails figured it was a wild animal. When he looked up, he was shocked to see another mobian standing nearby, looking down at him.  
"Oh, hey!" he exclaimed, "Who are you?"  
The stranger appeared mildly frustrated about this inquiry. He just grunted, put his head down and murmured "Dalziel." He pronounced the word _Dee-ell_.  
Tails cleared his throat and was about to say more, but he hesitated. Was this guy familiar to him? He was a fox, the same race as Tails except that he was older, and there was an aura of familiarity about him. A very strong aura. "Let's not wait much longer," he said, "I don't know how much time we have. We're almost there."  
"Huh." Tails was distracted by a sheet of paper in his hand, folded over twice. He couldn't remember picking this up.  
In fact, he couldn't remember much of anything that had happened recently. The wilderness of the Kirandul mountains had all blended together into a kind of blur after a while, and he felt as though he'd blacked out for part of the journey. Was it possible he'd met this stranger before, and somehow it had completely slipped his mind? The guy seemed to know him.  
Tails opened the folded paper to find that it was a dirty note, smudged with mud and addressed to him. Where had this come from? _What was going on?_ His lips moved as he read the scrawled words written in unfamiliar cursive:

_Hello, Tails! _

I'm afraid you've been in an unfortunate accident, and have received an injury to the head. A symptom of this injury is a temporary loss of short-term memory function. Do not panic! You are in safe hands. With plenty of bed-rest, you will recover full recognitive functionality. I will return to check on you later. You might like to make use of your time by

- writing down anything you remember about yourself, e.g. where you came from!  
- feel free to look at any of the books in the room but please take good care of them  
- get some sleep! (there was a scribbled smiley-face here)

_Take care,  
Marx Templeton, esq. (NOT a doctor! ha ha)_

Underneath, he saw a further collection of scribbles, and even more amazingly, this batch he recognised as _his own handwriting_. He hadn't even the vaguest recollection of any of this, and not a single word of what he read made any sense.

_Ask wolf brothers RE: escape town. Secret hole - ? _

OVERDRAW (?)

"Remote robot" is IMPORTANT. Ask STANLEY.

Finally, in a third and almost illegible script, another note was scrawled:

_TRUST DALZIEL (dee-ell)_

Tails looked up at the famliar stranger standing nearby. "Is your name spelled with a 'Z'?" he asked.  
"Yes," the other replied, "D, A, L-"  
"This is you!" Tails exclaimed, "On this note!"  
"Yeah."  
"Well _what the heck is going on, here?_ I don't remember writing this! Some of it is in my own handwriting!"  
"What does the note say?"  
"I don't understand _any_ of this crap! It says I have a... what, a _memory_ problem? I remember everything just fine!"  
"Do you?"  
(-wound down again, buckaroo-)  
"Yes! I-"  
(-you can't stay here, exile-)  
Tails put his head in his hands, his mind reeling and spinning. As soon as his fingers touched his brow, he detected something strange. Something was wrapped around his head. _Bandages._ He cried out and began to tear them off.  
(-you won't be harmed, yes?-)  
What were these voices in his head? _What was going on?_  
"Calm down," said Dalziel, "You have to listen to me, okay? You have to trust me. I'm your friend."  
"I don't _know_ you!" Tails yelled.  
"Yes you do. Trust me, okay? Listen. Your memory has been taken from you. There are some very powerful people who want to get to you, and they're nearby. You _have_ to let me help you. I'm going to get you to safety."  
Tails looked down at the sheet of paper again. He felt as though the line between dream and life had broken down and the residue of his wildest dreams of adventure were seeping out to infect his reality. Being persued by powerful enemies who existed only in theory, speaking to an imaginary ally who bore an uncanny resemblance to himself. What could this be if not a dream?  
But he could smell the scent of wildflowers, could feel the rough, dry texture of the paper between his fingers. A dream could not so imitate the sharp clarity of the senses. If he pierced himself he would feel the pain and bleed. This was reality. Somehow, this was happening.  
"Who is _Marx Templeton?_" he demanded, "Who is _Stanley_?"  
"I don't have a clue," Dalziel replied, "Except that what they've told you is absolutely right. You have a problem with your mind, Tails, and without my help you're going to stumble right back into their trap."  
"I'm not going anywhere with you! I need to get to Flightless Joe's airport!"  
"That's exactly where we're _going_. Look, I'll show you." He pointed through the canopy, and Tails squinted, trying to see past the foliage to what he was supposed to be looking at. He saw something white, towering above the trees. Two points of white, two buildings. Towers.  
(we'll have to wind each other up, buckaroo)(exile)  
"I've seen those before," he said.  
"Joe's airport," Dalziel replied, "We're almost there, now. Just a couple more miles. If we leave now then we can make it before _they_ get here. But only if we leave now."  
"Flightless Joe..."  
Joe's face flashed before his eyes, laughing. The laugh quickly became a scowl and Joe's face turned black. His beak sharpened, a sharp crest grew out of his scalp like feathered darts.  
The two towers... the remote robot... the wolf brothers... overdraw...  
"Are we _going?_" Dalziel demanded.  
"Yeah... yeah, if you're going to take me, then take me."  
He followed the older fox through the scrubland until it thinned out into a wood of pine trees. The ground was flatter, here, less rocky, covered in fallen cones. Tails could see the two white towers some distance ahead, among other buildings.  
"They're familiar," he said, "But I don't know they're familiar for the right reasons. Something's strange, here."  
"_Hurry up!_" Dalziel hissed, "They're coming!"  
Fear began to well up in Tails' heart and gut. He couldn't see or hear the invisible, nameless enemy. The pine trees rose up around him like sentinels, and in the strangeness of the situation he wouldn't have been too surprised if they moved to attack him. Anything could be possible. Reality had taken a holiday.  
"_Run!_" Dalziel shouted all at once, and Tails found himself running. He imagined a darkness behind him, a sea of ink, rushing through the trees, consuming the grass and the bushes and the rocks and everything behind him. And could he trust anything that he imagined to be false or fictional anymore? Dalziel was shouting that he had to make it, that he had to keep running and never look back, just keep running toward the towers. He said that he was going to fall back and try to hold them off, but that Tails was going to have to keep going forward without him. Tails was nearly in tears, but he didn't dare stop, he couldn't, or else...  
Or else...  
He slowed his pace. Why was he running? Why was he _crying?_ It almost felt as though somebody had been shouting at him, chasing him, but when he turned around, nobody was there. Nobody at all. He stopped entirely and looked around while he struggled to get his breath back.  
A silent pine forest spread out around him. The fallen cones crunched beneath his shoes. There was a wind rushing through the branches and a sudden gust took him by surprise, ripping something from his hand that he didn't even know he'd been holding.  
Just a scrap of paper. It blew upward into the treetops as though the trees were its home and family; danced among the branches and the pine needles and vanished.  
Something else was moving through the canopy. Tails wouldn't even have spotted it if he hadn't been watching the paper blow away. He thought at first that it was a bird; it moved with clear, though drunken, deliberation. But it didn't have any wings. Tails saw that this creature flew in much the same way that he himself did, using a circular rotor above its head. He was so taken by this oddity that he almost failed to notice over the rushing wind that the thing was _calling out his name._  
It descended quickly toward him, and Tails feared it would collide with his head. Instead it stopped inches from his face so that he could see at last what it really was. A robot - almost like a toy, a little thing coloured all in tarnished gold with a cute mockery of a face and two pointed ears that gave it a distinct pig-like appearance. Its eyes glowed, nothing but bulbs in their sockets.  
"_Tails!_" the thing exclaimed with a tinny, digital impersonation of a voice. "I found you! Thank heavens I found you!"  
"Tock," Tails whispered, and held out his hands for the thing to land. He didn't know how he recognised the little robot, the memory was like something from a dream. "You're back."  
"Stanley Templeton," the robot told him, "In Quarantine. You helped me. I have to help you! You're in danger! An ambush... oh, no..."  
"I don't know who you are," Tails said, "I can't... I can't quite remember... It's fading out of my head..."  
"_I'm winding down!_" the thing exclaimed, and its voice started to slow and deepen, like a stretched-out audio tape. Tails saw that it had a key turning in its back, as though filled with clockwork, and it was slowing as well. "We're _both_ winding down! Quickly! Crank me up! I have... to... warn... you... I... ... have ... ... to ... ... ... help ..."  
Tails reached for the key but stayed his hand. The wind rustled the pine needles like a hundred brooms sweeping the sky. It was the only sound.  
_What am I doing?_  
He was alone. Alone in the wood but for the statue lying in the palm of his hand. And what _was_ it? Though he'd seen it before, the specific memories eluded him, retreated from him into the abyss, the darkness.  
_What am I doing here?_  
Tails Prower stood alone in the pine forest. A breeze blew back his fur and rustled the pine needles, and this was the only sound. The forest was empty, and so too was his mind.

---

**8:40 am**

He slept through the night, and woke up to somebody tapping him with a foot.  
Tails groaned and batted limply at whoever was disturbing him. Then he frowned and slowly opened his eyes. There was somebody standing above him, a fox, the same as himself except older. Tails dragged himself to a sitting position, and found that he'd been sleeping in a puddle of mud. It was dried and caked in his fur.  
"Wasn't sure I was gonna find you again, kiddo," the stranger said, "Real glad that I did. Thought you might've gone and got yourself caught."  
"I know you," Tails said, and he was sure that he did, although from where he couldn't say. He was still tired and confused.  
"Yeah, you do," the other replied, and offered him a hand. "Do you remember me?"  
Tails took the hand and let the familiar stranger help him to his feet. "I don't- I can't really remember who you are. Just that I know you. Is that weird?"  
"You've got a problem with your head," the fox said, and tapped Tails' head for emphasis. "Had some memories taken out. My name's Dalziel, does that ring a bell?"  
"I'm not sure," Tails replied. He cupped his head where the fox had touched him, and found that his entire cranium was tightly bandaged up. He felt a throbbing pain somewhere underneath. "Did you say I had... memories taken out?"  
"You're wanted by some pretty powerful people," Dalziel said, "They're everywhere around here. Searching for you. That means we have to get going."  
"No, no-" Tails stammered. "Wait... I was hiking, and-"  
An image flashed through his mind. A black squid, flying over trees.  
"You don't remember them," Dalziel insisted, "_They_ made sure of that. Are you feeling okay? Do you know what happened to you yesterday?"  
"...Kirandul Range. I was hiking through the mountains, and-"  
Another image. Someone shining a torch into his eyes, he couldn't see past the light. They were just silhouettes, standing around him like doctors. He grabbed his throbbing head and groaned. "I don't... I don't know what's happening..."  
"Listen to me." Dalziel held him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. "We're going to get to safety, okay? I'm going to get you to Flightless Joe, to the airport. You can be looked after, there. You'll be out of their reach." Tails noticed that something was wrong with his right arm, but when Dalziel noticed he was staring, he turned modest and covered the arm up, obviously sensitive about it.  
"You know Flightless Joe?" Tails asked.  
"Yes. Let's go."  
They started walking hurriedly toward a patch of thick scrub. Tails was limping due to a sharp pain at his ankle, and all at once realised that it was from something sharp lodged in his sock. "Wait," he said, and reached down to extract it.  
Strangely, the offending object was a ballpoint pen. There was something else, as well - a folded piece of paper. He opened it up to find that it was a note.  
Dalziel stood at his shoulder while Tails read through it. This was bizarre, the note was addressed to him and detailed a number of things in both his and someone else's handwriting.  
"Temporary loss of short-term memory function," he whispered. "This is so weird, is this... is this a prank? I don't remember any accident, I was- I-"  
"You've been writing yourself notes," Dalziel said, "Good. That'll help you to keep track of things. _They_ want you to be confused."  
The other fox took the note and the pen from him, and scrawled a message of his own at the bottom. When Tails took it back, he read over the new amendment.

_TRUST DALZIEL (dee-ell)_

"You spell your name with a 'Z'?" Tails asked.  
"Yeah. Blame my father, he had the affinity for stupid names. Who is _Marx Templeton_, do you remember?"  
"I don't have a clue. I've never heard of him."  
"Could be one of _them_. Be careful what you read, they'll send messages to try and mislead you, try and bring you back to them."  
"Who are _they_? What are you talking about?"  
They started to hurry through the scrub again. Dalziel sighed. "You keep asking and I keep telling. Let's just say they have a vested interest in recapturing you, and they have the resources to make it happen. As long as you stick with me, we have a chance of beating them."  
"But that's ridiculous!" Tails protested, "Nobody even knows I'm here! And why would anybody want to capture me? I haven't done anything to harm anyone!"  
"You're thinking in terms of your old memories, the things you knew when you came here. There's a whole block of time that you have no memory of, it's all been erased."  
"_Erased!_ How much time?"  
"I don't know. Might be days, might be weeks. _Hurry up!_ I don't know how much time we have."  
Tails wasn't used to trusting strangers without any reason for doing so, but this situation was just too bizarre to be able to figure out any other plan of action. It seemed just a few minuates ago he'd been hiking through a patch of mountainous terrain with his pack on his back, and now a stranger was leading him through the scrub, telling him that his memory had been erased and that he was in grave danger from some powerful unknown threat. If not for the fact that he felt as though he knew this guy so well, he would be inclined to write it all off as garbage. But his mind was very confused with itself. There were images in his head that didn't make sense, memories of things he'd never seen. It was almost as though he'd blinked and now his life didn't belong to him anymore. It was too bizarre for him to handle.  
After walking for an hour, neither of them saying very much to each other, Tails announced that he was tired and they simply had to rest a moment. Begrudgingly, Dalziel conceded, but only if they only stayed a moment. Tails wasn't even sure why he needed to ask. What authority did this stranger assume over his journey, anyway? Who _was_ the stranger? By now, Tails couldn't even recall his name.  
He sat on a log and rested his head in his hands. He thought about the journey that lay ahead of him and smiled. Would his father be proud of him, to know what Tails was doing in his honour? Would Sonic be proud to know that the young boy he had loved and protected for so long had grown into an adult, and was walking in his footsteps? He sighed, and wished they were all still around to see him take up his destiny.  
There was movement ahead of him, and Tails figured it was a wild animal. When he looked up, he was shocked to see another mobian standing nearby, looking down at him.

---

**11:23 pm**

Tails awoke when somebody grabbed him. At first he thought it was a part of his nightmare, but it was immediately evident that two dark figures, very real ones, were attacking him in the night.  
He tried to cry out, but something was stuffed in his mouth. It tasted like a dirty sock. He fought tooth and nail, and actually seemed to give the attackers more of a fight than they had expected. He seemed to hurt one of them, who cried out, and the other reprimanded him for making too much noise.  
They overpowered him, however, and dragged him out of bed. He only had a few seconds to question why he was in a bed in the first place, before one of the attackers (probably the one he'd hurt) whacked him in the head. The blow hurt a lot more than it should have. Tails was completely stunned, he saw an explosion of light and a galaxy of stars, and fell limp in his assailants' arms.  
The two figures didn't seem to be very strong, the two of them combined still found it awkward to carry him, and Tails wasn't very heavy to begin with. They dragged him down a flight of stairs (_stairs?_) and out an open door into the biting cold of the night. He started to fight again, but one of the attackers asked him if he wanted another whack in the noggin, and he ceased resisting.  
Tails was dragged some distance before he heard a sound like somebody messing with a chain wire fence, and then he was dragged some more before he was left in a puddle of mud.  
As soon as his attackers moved away from him, he spat out the sock and started coughing.  
"We're sorry," someone said. Tails lifted his head and squinted to try and see who had attacked him. The silhouettes of two young wolves stood on the other side of a chain wire fence. Their voices betrayed them to be possibly even younger than Tails.  
"You just can't stay here. They'll punish us if they find you. You have to stay out there, with the rest of the exiles. Don't come back."  
Tails just lay there in shock, resting off the pain in his head. Already it seemed as though what had happened to him had been a dream. The memory seemed vague and insubstantial, fading from his mind as memories of dreams tend to do. Had he dreamed of a house? Nonsense. He was in the outdoors, now, where he always had been. He closed his eyes again and curled up against the cold. He slept through the night, and woke up to somebody tapping him with a foot.

---

**12:53 pm**

Tails swore to remember. That was his only way out. He had to remember... what? He lost his train of thought and frowned. It was this darn throbbing pain in his head, he couldn't think straight. He figured he would take a walk to clear his head, and when he opened his eyes he expected to be inside a tent... but his heart skipped a beat when he discovered he had no idea where he was.  
A wood ceiling lay above him. He was lying on a bed, in a strange house. He didn't recognise the place at all.  
Tails knew that the mind occasionally played tricks immediately after waking, he had often forgotten where he was when sleeping in a strange place. Had he reached Joe's home and stayed the night? He didn't recall. Minutes passed, and he still did not recall. The room he was in was still unfamiliar. He didn't even think he'd really been asleep.  
_You_ must _have been asleep, Tails, people don't just close their eyes and forget where they are._  
It'd come back to him. It had to. Tails sat up in bed and had a look around.  
He was in a small room, somebody's bedroom, lined with bookcases. Most of the books were on subjects related to medicine. Textbooks and journals. There were also novels, encyclopedias and other things. Whoever lived here was an avid reader, and clearly not much else. Besides the bookshelves and the bed, there was only a desk and a window.  
Totally unfamiliar.  
_This is ridiculous,_ Tails thought, and put his head in his hands. It was then that he noticed something wrapped around his head. A bandage. It covered everything above his eyes except for his ears, and there was a dull, throbbing ache underneath. He couldn't remember injuring himself. Another discrepancy. It was as though he was channeling a life that wasn't his own.  
He stood up and walked to the closed door, but when he wiggled the handle he found that it was locked. No latch, either - it was a deadlock, a keyhole on both sides, and he couldn't see a key anywhere in the room with him. Great, so he was a captive, as well. Why couldn't he remember how he got here? Had he been drugged and kidnapped?  
He went to the window. What he saw outside boggled him even further - a town, like a little village, stretched out before him. People wandered back and forth along a cobblestone street, chatting and walking together as they went about their normal daily routine. The unusual thing about these particular people was that they were wearing clothes so ridiculously out of fashion that they seemed better suited to a time about which some of the more elderly Freedom Fighters often reminisced. Tails tried to get their attention, but nobody could hear him through the glass. Eventually he gave up and sat on the floor, groaning. Still no closer to figuring this out.  
Something odd was sitting on a side-table by the bed. He edged closer to see what it was. A toy of some kind, a little metal statue that vaguely resembled a pig. It attracted his attention because it was the only thing in this room that he found familiar. It was a strange object, out of place, and it held some vague kind of significance for him. Why could he imagine it flying around and speaking to him? Maybe he'd dreamed about it. If he'd been drugged, he probably hallucinated all sorts of bizarre stories about the objects in this room.  
The statue was being used as a paperweight. Tails lifted it and held the sheet of paper up so he could read it. A note, addressed to him.

_Hello, Tails! _

I'm afraid you've been in an unfortunate accident, and have received an injury to the head. A symptom of this injury is a temporary loss of short-term memory function. Do not panic! You are in safe hands. With plenty of bed-rest, you will recover full recognitive functionality. I will return to check on you later. You might like to make use of your time by

- writing down anything you remember about yourself, e.g. where you came from!  
- feel free to look at any of the books in the room but please take good care of them  
- get some sleep! (there was a scribbled smiley-face here)

_Take care,  
Marx Templeton, esq. (NOT a doctor! ha ha)_

The note was aggrivatingly unspecific. Who was this _Marx Templeton_ and under what authority did he presume to hold Tails against his will? What, exactly, did a _temporary loss of short-term memory function_ imply? What kind of accident had he been in? Just where the heck was he, and how long was he going to have to stay here?  
Was that why he couldn't remember where he was? He got a knock on the head and lost his memory? Memory loss was a terrifying concept to him, because a person's entire reality was constructed from his memories. Without memory, his reality was constructed from the testimonies of the people around him. By this _Templeton_ character. It was times like these when Tails wished he had stayed with the Freedom Fighters, with his friends. If something like this happened while he was surrounded by people he trusted, then he would at least know that what he was being fed was the truth. As it stood, these people could tell him literally anything.  
_Short-term memory_. He supposed that was something of the cognitive equivalent of being far-sighted rather than near-sighted. He could remember things that happened a long time ago, but not things that happened recently. This made sense because he remembered the entirity of his life with perfect clarity right up to his journey into the Kirandul Mountains, but anything that happened recently, including this supposed accident, was a mystery to him. It was as though an editor had taken a pair of scissors to the film-reel in his head, cut out a chunk of indeterminate time and stuck the two ends back together. His hike in the mountains felt like it had been yesterday; heck, ten minutes ago. But how long ago had it really been? He certainly wasn't in the mountains now, there weren't any towns like this in the Kirandul Range, at least not to his knowledge.  
Tails looked again at the paperweight. It was actually some kind of robot, it seemed. The key sticking out of its back indicated that it might do something. Why was this thing significant to him?  
(we need to wind each other up, buckaroo)  
He picked it up and turned the key a few times, but the toy didn't do anything. It made a few sick grinding noises and then ceased. Not the revelation he was hoping for.  
There was a sound at the door - a key being turned in the latch. Tails propped his head up, defensive and wary. The door opened very slowly, and three heads poked around it from the other side. Three boys - two wolves and a raccoon. They were all around his age, he thought, though the wolves might have been older. They just stood there in the doorway, staring at him like he was a bizarre kind of insect, or a surrealist piece in a museum.  
"Who are you?" Tails barked after a moment. He knew those stares only too well, they were the stares of people who had already labelled him a freak in their minds.  
"I'm Richie," one of the wolves said after a moment. He introduced the other wolf as his brother Thomas and the Raccoon as Stanley. Then they went back to staring.  
"Do we know each other?" Tails prompted. They shook their heads 'no'.  
"You're the outsider," Stanley the raccoon said, "My Dad says you're sick. He says you might be an exile."  
"You can't stay here if you're an exile," Richie added, with obvious venom, "They'll punish us if you are. They'll take our stuff away. They might even hurt our parents."  
"What are you talking about?" Tails demanded.  
"Not allowed to keep exiles in town, that's what they _say_," the wolf insisted.  
"What do you mean by 'exile'?"  
"The people who live outside the fence. They're really bad people 'cause they're ugly and they got all these like germs and stuff."  
"My Dad says you might be an exile," Stanley said again, "Because you're different from us, and you've got defects. And nobody's ever seen you before."  
Tails' body temperature rose slightly at the accusation of _defects_, but he bit his tongue. "Outside the fence," he said, "What fence?"  
"The fence around the town," Richie replied. "It's all locked up so the exiles can't get in."  
"And you're not allowed outside of it?" Tails asked. This was bad news - a fence meant that he was imprisoned in this town, even if he escaped the house.  
"We're not supposed to," Thomas said, "But we found this hole in the fence nobody knows about, and we-"  
Richie nudged his brother hard with an elbow. "Shut up!"  
The two wolves began to argue in whispers, and Tails took the opportunity to scribble a note to himself, in the event that his memory should fail him again. A pen had been left on the side-table, and underneath Marx Templeton's note, Tails jotted:

_Ask wolf brothers RE: escape town. Secret hole - ?_

"If you're an exile then you can't stay here," Richie told him again, and this time he sounded more threatening. "They might exile my Dad if they find you."  
"Who are you afraid of?" Tails asked. "Who's in charge of you?"  
"They- they make us better-" Thomas stammered. Richie nudged him again, more softly, and Thomas put his head down and looked glum.  
"Overdraw," Richie said. "Overdraw's in charge. He's not a nice person, he likes to take stuff away from us and hurt us. He's much meaner than the others and that's why we have to _follow the rules_. That means no exiles."  
The word 'overdraw' triggered a distinct twinge of familiarity deep within Tails' mind. He couldn't pinpoint where he had heard it before, but it was important. He jotted it down on his note and underlined it. If _Overdraw_ was in charge, then who was _Templeton_?  
"And who is _Marx Templeton_?" he asked.  
"He's my Dad," Stanley replied, "This is his room, but he said you could have it for now."  
"Does he run things here? Is he an authority in this town?"  
Stanley seemed to find this a very strange question. "No, uh... only the Armada do all that."  
"My Dad says he _knows_ you're an exile," Richie said, and this time he pointed an accusing finger at Tails.  
"I'm _not_ an _exile_!" Tails barked, "I haven't been _exiled_ from anywhere!"  
"My Dad says he _knows_," the wolf insisted, "You're an exile, 'cause _you_ don't have _Alteration Seventy-Six_. If you were from Quarantine then you would. _All_ the kids in town have Alteration Seventy-Six."  
"What the heck are you talking about? I don't-"  
Richie lifted his arms over his head, and Tails' breath caught in his throat. He nearly choked on air. He began to question his own sanity, because he quite literally could not believe what he was seeing.  
Richie had wings.  
They weren't proper wings, like those that you'd see on a bird. They weren't even quite like a bat's wings. They were something like flaps of flesh and skin that ran from his wrists down to his waist. Tails hadn't noticed them before because they were covered in fur like the rest of him, and they seemed to drape close to his body when his arms were by his side. Lifting them like that seemed to stimulate muscles inside the flaps that spread them out like sails. For a moment, Tails thought he'd misidentified Richie's race, that he really was some kind of bat, but then his brother showed his own set of wings - and, reluctantly, so did Stanley the raccoon.  
"They- They make us _better_," Thomas stammered.  
"Good _God_!" Tails exclaimed, and instantly felt bad about it. He knew better than anyone the pain of growing up with a mutation and having people scream out profanity at the sight of him. But this was no random mutation, this was something much more. Three kids, one of them not only unrelated but _a completely different species_ to the others, sharing the exact same defect? Richie hadn't called it a mutation, he'd called it an _alteration_. What on Mobius had happened to these people? _Where had he been brought?_  
"Dad said all the kids who didn't get it were exiled," Richie continued, "And you don't have it, that makes _you_ an exile. So you better not stick around here, got it?" With that, he put an arm around his brother, and the two wolves left the room. Stanley was about to follow them, but Tails called out to him.  
"Wait! Wait a second!"  
The raccoon stopped, and reluctantly turned to him.  
"Where am I?" Tails asked, "What do you call this place?"  
Stanley shrugged. "This is Quarantine. This is our home."  
"And this Overdraw, he's somehow responsible for you having these... these _alterations_?"  
"Oh, no," the raccoon replied, "Not Overdraw. He just upholds the law."  
Tails glanced at the little robot on the side-table, and felt the same sense of familiarity he experienced earlier. "Do you know what this is?" he asked Stanley, and lifted the toy to show it.  
"Yeah," Stanley replied, and shrugged again. "It's a remote robot. And old one. They don't use this kind anymore."  
"What do you mean?"  
Stanley took the robot and passed it slowly from one hand to the other. "They use them to watch us and stuff, make sure we're following all the rules. See, this kind is clockwork. You wind it up with this key. They don't use the clockwork ones anymore because they got something better, but the new ones, they don't have any personality. These ones are like people, but some of them are mean." He gave the key a few good cranks, and when nothing happened, he frowned. "It's busted."  
"Where did it come from?" Tails asked.  
Stanley shrugged again. He did that a lot. "You had it with you when you came here. Dad said he thought it might have had a message on it, like the Armada sent you here or something, but it doesn't work and Dad says you've forgotten anyway 'cause when he asks you about it you say you don't know."  
"This thing is important, for some reason. I think it's a key to finding out what's happened to me, these memories I've lost."  
"Well, I could fix it for you."  
This caught Tails by surprise. "Really?"  
"Sure... I mean, maybe. I guess so. Depends on what's wrong with it. I know all about this kind of thing, it's what I'm interested in. They teach us anything we want to know, because they want us to learn stuff. I've taken these things apart before, they're real easy to fix. Real easy to break, too, which is why they stopped using them."  
The wolf brothers Richie and Thomas appeared in the doorway again. "_Stan!_" Richie shouted, "Come _on!_"  
"I gotta go," Stan said.  
"You don't have to," Tails replied, "Don't let them boss you around."  
"It's better if I do." Almost as an afterthought, he took the remote robot out of Tails' hands. "I'll try to fix it, okay?"  
After the kids left, Tails wrote some more notes to himself.

_"Remote robot" is IMPORTANT. Ask STANLEY_.

He almost placed the sheet of paper back on the side-table, but then he thought twice. What if somebody decided to take it from him in the night? If he was to dig his way out of this hole, he was going to have to make sure that he had access to the truth. He folded it up into a small finger of paper and slipped it into his sock. He hid the pen the same way.  
Tails reclined on the bed (_Templeton_'s bed, someone he may as well never have met) and tried to relax his mind enough that he might remember something. He stared at the ceiling for a while and then closed his eyes. The attempt backfired on him, for it was only a few minutes before he couldn't quite remember who he'd recently been speaking to, or if he'd actually been speaking at all. He forgot the room, forgot the note, forgot the horrid alterations of the children in the town, forgot the town. His thoughts wandered bit by bit until he found himself wondering how much longer it would be before this hike was over and he arrived at Flightless Joe's airport. Then he fell asleep.  
Tails' slumber was plagued with nightmares. In his dream he was running through a field, desperate to escape something that was much faster than he was. To his left he could see two white towers stretching to the heavens, but he knew they held no sanctuary for him. He stole a backward glance to try and see what was behind him, but all he saw was a sea of black. Whispering voices emanated from it like miasma.  
(_-stupid retard-_)  
(_-an exile, yes?-_)  
(_-overdraw-_)  
And all at once, Tails realised what the black ocean was really doing. It was eating his past.  
Someone was running beside him, now. He didn't recognise this person, and yet he did. He was a fox, older than himself, and dressed in tattered rags.  
"Things aren't as they seem, Buckaroo," the fox told him, and he grabbed Tails' shoulder with a hand that looked like a bird's talon. It _was_ a bird's talon. The familiar stranger transformed into a bird right before his eyes, and took off flying. He wasn't wearing rags at all, he was in a neat military uniform, and he hovered a few feet away, looking down at Tails from above.  
"You won't be harmed, yes?" he screeched, and then darted down with his clawed talons out in front of him, a bird of prey going in for the kill.  
Tails awoke when somebody grabbed him. At first he thought it was a part of his nightmare, but it was immediately evident that two dark figures, very real ones, were attacking him in the night.

---

**12:17 pm**

The world was a chaos of lights and echoes, faces both familiar and unknown to him. As he drifted in and out of the darkness, whispered voices told him that everything was going to be all right.  
An explosion of intense light woke him, and as he squinted to adjust his eyes, the world slowly came into focus around him.  
Tails was lying in a soft bed with his upper body propped up by many pillows so that he was almost sitting. There were several people around him, none of whom he recognised. The source of the light was a tiny torch inches from his face, being shone into his eyes by a raccoon. He batted the torch away, very weakly, and sat up straighter, rubbing his eyes with the other hand.  
"Who are you?" he asked.  
The raccoon chuckled as though he'd said something witty.  
"Yes, indeed."  
"What?"  
The stranger clicked off the torch and reclined. He was modestly dressed in an old-fashioned suit with a thick, black moustache that trailed across his jawline, and a small pair of spectacles that he adjusted on his snout. "You must have asked me the same question a dozen times, now. At least now, we finally know why."  
"What are you talking about?" Tails asked, "I've never seen you before! Any of you! Where have you brought me? What am I doing here?"  
"Calm down, young lad. I'm afraid you've been in an accident."  
The situation finally became clear in Tails' mind. He'd been hiking through dangerous territory, and through some foolish escapade he'd managed to injure himself, had been lucky enough to be found by a passer-by and had woken up in hospital. Quickly he tested all of his limbs and appendages to make sure they were all still there and he could still feel them. He was relieved to find that he seemed to be relatively intact, although his whole body ached and there was a bandage around his head.  
"If I may introduce myself once again," the raccoon said, "My name is Marx Templeton, I'm somewhat of a medical professional here in Quarantine, although we don't usually have much need for doctors as I suppose you can imagine. Though I don't want to make light of your condition, I have to say it's exciting to have a patient of my own, for once."  
Tails looked around the room at the dozen-or-so strangers who had gathered around. They were all dressed in fairly elaborate clothing that seemed fifty years out of fashion. The room itself was cosy and personal, more like somebody's home than a hospital ward.  
"What kind of accident?" he asked, putting a hand to the rough dome of bandage that was the top of his head. Two holes had been cut for his ears.  
"We may never know, I'm afraid," Templeton said, which puzzled Tails somewhat. "You've been wandering around for quite a while out there, compounding your problems. Multiple blows to the head, from numerous causes. You've got a pretty harsh case of concussion, that's why you fainted. You need some bed-rest, stop running into things for long enough to heal up."  
"I don't remember fainting," Tails said, "I don't- I don't remember any accident."  
"You have a condition known as _anterograde amnesia_. I've read about the condition, but of course, I've never met a sufferer personally."  
"Amnesia? No... No, I _know_ who I am." He remembered that Sonic had been under the spell of some kind of amnesia when they had first met. The hedgehog hadn't known how old he was, or even his own name. Tails' memories were as lucid as they always had been. His passion for this quest was as strong as ever.  
"There is more than one form of amnesia," Templeton replied, "_Your_ condition affects your _short_ term memory. You see, the memories that you already have stored away, things you remember from right up until roughly the time of your accident, these are memories that you keep. What's happened is that an acute head trauma has inhibited your brain's ability to save your short-term memories, and as such, everything that's happened between the onset of the trauma and now is lost to you. Every time your attention shifts from one thing to another, your memory is erased. In a few minutes, you won't remember this conversation. You won't remember who I am or where you are, and you'll ask all these questions again."  
Tails frowned. It all sounded crazy, but of course it explained the haze that shrouded his recent memory and the mystery surrounding his presence here.  
"If this is true," he said, "Then I could have been wandering around mindlessly for days, or even weeks, and I wouldn't even know it. Everything I've done, it's all gone."  
"The bump on your head is relatively fresh," Templeton replied, "I'd say it's a few days old, a week at the latest."  
"And are you telling me that I'm going to be like this for the rest of my life? That I'm going to... _forget_ the rest of my life?"  
"Oh, mercy no!" Templeton laughed, and Tails was slightly offended by his mirth. "No, most of these cases are very temporary. I can already tell that you're starting to carry some of your memory forward."  
"But you're not a doctor," Tails said firmly. He was beginning to grow flustered, overcome by the seriousness of this situation and the flippant way with which he was being treated for it. It was almost as though this Templeton character was more interested in the academic value of Tails' condition than in helping him treat it. He felt as though he was being observed like a rat  
(hamster)  
in a cage.  
"Well, I- No, I-" Templeton spluttered, "I've _read_ about all this. I've studied very hard, this is what interests me, you see. The Armada give us books, anything we want, anything at all. They like us to study, they want us to learn. To elevate ourselves."  
"That's just great, but do you have any _real_ doctors I can speak to? Qualified professionals?"  
The blank looks that his inquiry attracted, from Templeton and from everyone else, dampened his spirits.  
"No," the raccoon replied at last, "Not here, not in Quarantine. The Armada provide us with all our medical needs." He laughed again. "It'd be pretty stupid to make one of _us_ a doctor, when _they're_ looking after us! That'd be like giving a zoic _chimp_ a Ph.D!"  
The others chuckled at this, too.  
"Okay, fine, then can I talk to the _Armada_?" Tails asked, "Who are _they_?"  
Templeton's smile drooped. He looked at Tails as though he'd just said something in another language, then leaned in close, adjusting his spectacles again.  
"My boy," he said, "Where _are_ you from? I only ask this, because... well, to be honest, nobody I've spoken to seems to recognise you. Very distinctive, too, a child with two tails. Even if you were an exile... but oh, we _would_ have a bit of a problem, in that case, wouldn't we!" He chuckled uneasily, his voice wavered.  
"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't come from around here, I came here looking for the airport."  
"The... airport?"  
"I'm looking for Flightless Joe."  
That blank look again for a moment, and then another uneasy chuckle. "Oh, we're _all_ flightless here," Templeton said, "They say that's just the problem with us. You go ahead and have a rest here for a while. You've gotten yourself quite knocked about, doing whatever it is that you've been doing."  
"And am I going to forget all of this?" Tails asked, "How long before I completely forget everything you just told me? How am I going to get over this thing if I don't even know what's wrong with me?"  
"I shall write you a note, and leave it beside your bed. I'll keep this door locked, for your own safety. Just so you don't go wandering about in a daze, and go get yourself in trouble again."  
Tails was very adverse to the idea of being locked in a room by these people, who seemed only a few steps shy of crazy. What if they never let him out? It was easy for Tails to frighten himself with the possibilities. For all he knew, he'd already been trapped in here for a year, trapped perpetually in this torturous memory cycle, unable to even recognise his own imprisonment. The fake doctor might drop in once in a while and have this conversation with him, just to get a kick out of his reactions.  
"Okay," he said. What else could he do? "But can you leave the pen with me?"  
"Sure."  
While Templeton scribbled on a piece of paper, Tails probed his mind. Maybe this thing was psychological, mind over matter. If he could just _force_ himself to remember this, maybe he would. Could he remember _anything_ of the past few days?  
"Here you are," Templeton said, and he placed the sheet of paper on a bedside table, using a very strange metal toy as a paperweight. "Now we'll clear out of here and let you have some rest, okay? I'll be back a little later to find out how you're doing."  
All of the strangers began to file out the door. Templeton was last, and before he exited, he turned to Tails one last time.  
"I'd really like to talk some more," he said, "I'd like to find out where you're from."  
He closed the door behind him. Tails sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if he would ever get to Kitsune Atole. Somewhere nearby, his plane was sitting in a hangar waiting to be used. Flightless Joe didn't even know to expect him, so there was little chance of a rescue. Nobody knew he was here. Nobody at all. If he was going to get out of this, he was going to have to do it himself.  
"I have to remember," he said. "I have to stop-"  
(winding down, buckaroo)  
Tails swore to remember. That was his only way out. He had to remember... what? He lost his train of thought and frowned. It was this darn throbbing pain in his head, he couldn't think straight. He figured he would take a walk to clear his head, and when he opened his eyes he expected to be inside a tent... but his heart skipped a beat when he discovered he had no idea where he was.

---

**10:02 am**

When he looked up and saw the village, it was new to him, and so pristine that it took his breath away. The charming little cottages were spaced out in rows along cobblestone streets and impossibly green, lush parkland. In the center was a large fountain spouting crystal-clear water in a beautiful symmetry. People were milling about in slightly old-fashioned clothing, chatting and laughing. Children were playing skip-rope in the park. The smells of bacon and pancakes wafted in a delightful cloud over the whole setting, carried though the chimney-smoke. Tails wondered if he'd died in his sleep and woken up in the suburbs of heaven.  
_Where did this come from?_ Had his mind gone blank? He'd only been hiking in the mountains a moment ago, or so he thought, and then his memory went hazy, then went completely, and then he woke up here. As though aliens had sucked him through a wormhole and deposited him in the village at the end of the universe.  
But such a pristine little utopia it was, such a temptation, that he found himself wandering toward it anyway. At the very least he could find out where he was and what was going on.  
The people of the village did not appear pleased to see him. Faces drooped, confusion reigned as he walked down the street. Someone dropped a ball and didn't try to pick it up, and it rolled to his feet and stopped there. Did these people _ever_ see outsiders? Why did they look so wary of him? He couldn't possibly be less intimidating. He smiled and waved at the people, but only the youngest children gave a favourable response. The rest just stared.  
"This is too weird," he muttered through a hopeful smile.  
As he walked, Tails was aware of a queer sensation of lightheadedness. He put a hand to his temple and found that it was quite badly bruised, though he couldn't remember how he had injured himself. The world began to swirl around him, the faces all melded into each other. He fell to his knees as everything drifted out of focus.  
Tails was aware of the presence of people, they gathered around him but didn't lend a hand. They simply watched him wilt like a shrub in the heat. As he dissolved into the abyss of his own mind, those who meant the most to Tails paraded themselves before him. Sonic, his father, Tyler, Joe, and the Freedom Fighters gathered with a sympathetic smile. They laid their hands down to catch him as he fell.  
The world was a chaos of lights and echoes, faces both familiar and unknown to him. As he drifted in and out of the darkness, whispered voices told him that everything was going to be all right.

---

**9:18 am**

When Tails opened his eyes again, he couldn't seem to recall exactly what he was doing.  
Just a slip of the mind, he decided. A momentary lapse in reason. He had been travelling for days, after all.  
He was holding something in his hand, he realised. It was about the size and shape of a large rock. He held it out and looked at it - strange. A little metal toy, something that looked like a robotic piglet, tarnished with age and caked with clods of dirt. Something he had picked up? When? Where _was_ his mind?  
No matter. The expanse of the Kirandul Range spread out before him, untamed bushland and rocky wilderness. Somewhere ahead was his destination; it wouldn't be long, now. He hadn't too far to go.  
Something was amiss, however. Something didn't seem right. He had the distinct sensation that he was being watched.  
Tails turned around to allay his fears, but what he found lurching over him only made his blood run cold.  
It was a wolf. The beast was almost the size of a bear, with inch-long spurs digging into the ground from each of its paws. It stared down at him with hungry eyes, ropes of saliva dripping from its foaming mouth. Its hide was unkempt and mange-ridden, its breaths rasping. Easily the biggest animal Tails had ever seen, and it was clearly insane and hungry for blood.  
Tails held his hands up, trembling despite his best intentions (_they can smell fear!_ his mind insisted) and backed away as slowly and carefully as he could, trying not to break eye contact.  
After a few moments of this, the monster frowned, and barked "_What?_"  
Tails could have screamed. Was _this_ a _mobian_? It was almost inconceivable. He'd never seen an anthric mobian whose features and mannerism so resembled that of a zoic animal that it could be mistaken for one. Yet it seemed possible, with a little consideration. And of course, animals couldn't talk.  
Mobian or not, the wolf put a fear in Tails that chilled him to the bone.  
"Don't hurt me," he said, "Please."  
"I ain't gonna _hurt_ you," the wolf snarled, and then he grinned devilishly. "I could."  
"He's forgotten again," said another voice, and Tails saw that there was yet another stranger here. A fox, the same as him, but older and dressed in rags. "Calm down, Tails."  
"You know my name? How do you-" Tails was officially freaked out. He started to back away again. "Just keep away from me, okay?"  
"Come here," the fox said, "I need to tell you something."  
"Tell it to him," Tails replied, motioning toward the huge wolf. "I'm outta here, okay? I'm leaving."  
With that, he turned and ran. He wasn't about to get mugged and left for dead by a couple of mountain winos, that was certainly not how he envisioned his demise. He fled down the side of a rocky embankment, through the heavy bushland, dry branches digging into him and trying to hold him back. Were the strangers following? He couldn't tell, but he wasn't about to stop.  
When Tails reached flat land, he slowed his pace. This wasn't what he expected to see at all.  
He'd arrived in a large valley, outside some kind of village complex. The facility was bordered by a wire-mesh fence that looked to be about forty feet high, and studded with barbs. Loops of razor-wire were threaded along the top of it for good measure. Tails could have believed that it was some kind of prison, if not for the fact that the complex inside appeared pristine, almost heavenly. The buildings were some distance from the fence, and he could see people milling about inside. They didn't appear to be imprisoned or unhappy. The fence was a total enigma.  
_But there shouldn't be any buildings in the Kirandul Range!_ he thought, _There shouldn't even be a valley like this!_  
Perhaps his information was out of date. It had to be. Someone had managed to find enough space in this harsh wasteland to build a settlement, and it looked as though they'd made a very good job of it. But what was with the _fence?_  
Tails forgot his concerns with the strangers in the mountains as he tried to figure out the mystery of the caged settlement. As he stood at the fence, holding onto the mesh and staring through it, somebody came up behind him and startled him with a grizzled voice.  
"Forget it, kid, you're never gettin' back in there."  
Tails turned around to find an elderly rabbit dressed in rags, held up by a makeshift crutch. He was in terrible shape.  
"I was never inside," Tails told him, but the rabbit screwed up his face and looked at him as though he was a creature from outer space.  
"It's _you_ again!" he barked. Then, more loudly, "_Pedro! It's the recall! It's the recall!_"  
Someone put a meaty arm around Tails' neck and another around his waist, and he cried out in alarm. Whoever had him was very smelly and very strong. The old rabbit also made a feeble grasp for him, but Tails managed to wriggle out of his captors' grip. Backing away, he saw that the one who grabbed him from behind was a very, very ugly hog. His arms were disproportionately large, and he had no discernable neck whatsoever, his facial features seeming to sprout right out of his chest. He roared something incomprehensible and charged, using his huge muscular arms for extra propulsion. Tails did the only thing he could think to do - he jumped before his attacker reached him, planted a foot in the hog's face and jumped again, clearing the brute entirely. On the second jump he curled his tails together and spun them, launching himself so high that he flew straight over the wire fence.  
Angry, shocked voices roared after him when he landed on the other side, and he turned to see several people raving, clawing and beating at the fence. The rabbit and the hog had been joined by others.  
"Good grief," he muttered, staring into the bloodshot eyes and contorted, infuriated faces of the people outside. What had he done to offend them so badly? They were positively livid, some of them close to tears in their anger. They were clearly insane, all of them. Completely out of their minds with rage and madness, they might have torn him limb from limb if he'd allowed them to capture him.  
Somebody tried to climb the fence to get to him. The would-be attacker climbed about halfway up before he grabbed a barb and fell backward into the gathering crowd.  
Tails turned his head toward the peaceful town in the valley, then looked back at the braying, snarling crowd and suddenly realised exactly why the fence was in place. It wasn't to keep anybody in.  
It was to keep _them_ out.  
Tails flipped the frenzied crowd an offensive hand signal, and then turned his back to them to make his way into the town. On his way he realised he was still carrying the little toy robot, whatever it was, and once again inspected it as though he'd never seen it before. As far as he was aware, he hadn't. But why had he held onto it?  
_Because it's important to me_, he realised. It was inexplicable, but he couldn't bear to lose it. The robot held a value to him that he couldn't explain.  
When he looked up and saw the village, it was new to him, and so pristine that it took his breath away.

---

**8:06 am**

Tails' dreams were filled with nonsensical images. He dreamed of a dark, monsterous squid that drifted through the sky, and black trucks driving across a field. He dreamed of his father, and of Uncle Tyler and Nightmare, of Sonic... and a tall, dark stranger in a decorated military uniform and a neat crest of plumage upon his head.  
When he awoke, he was surprised to find he wasn't inside a tent. Had he decided to sleep out under the stars the previous night? He couldn't even remember. Why was there such a haze over his memory? He found he couldn't quite recollect his most recent movements, he'd lost track of how many days he'd been hiking. It was dangerous for him to be so careless. If he truly wanted to make himself into an adventurer, he would have to do better than this.  
There was a bitter, rancid taste in his mouth, as though he'd eaten cat crap for dinner, and he spat in the dirt. His head hurt a lot, and when he touched his brow he found he had one mother of a lump, and probably a black eye too.  
_Geez, Tails. What have you been doing?_  
He felt poorly rested, and his whole body was worn and bruised. He felt around under his fur and found scabs and fresh wounds carved into his flesh like war tattoos. He was much more thoroughly beat up than he last recalled. There was a smoldering campfire site nearby and the coals were still warm.  
"Good, you're awake."  
Tails turned around and found a stranger standing over him. An older fox, the same race and colour as himself. No, not a stranger entirely - he vaguely recognised this person, though from where he couldn't quite tell. It was as though they'd spent a lot of time together but he'd forgotten the details. He felt mildly embarrassed amidst his confusion. Had he been drunk? Drugged? He felt no after-affects.  
"Time to go," the fox said, "Today's the day. Hurry up, we've got to go."  
"Go where?" Tails grunted.  
"Go to meet Flightless Joe. Get to the airport, get you safe. That _is_ where you want to go, isn't it?"  
"Yeah, but... hey, this is kind of embarrassing, but..."  
"You can't remember who I am. Yeah, I know. You say that every time."  
"Every time?"  
"I'll explain everything on the way. Again. But we have to get going, time is short."  
For lack of a better idea, Tails began to pack his things, only to find that he didn't seem to have any things to pack. There was no tent, no camp, nothing. When he asked the stranger about it, the fox just replied that it was all taken care of, and asked him again to hurry. While searching for anything he'd left behind, Tails spotted something strange lying in the dirt - it looked like an old wind-up toy, a little metal robot with a key in its back. Another bizarre clue. He picked it up and carried it with him.  
"My name's Dalziel," the fox told him as they walked, "My friend Dale is up ahead. We picked you up while you were wandering in circles, it's a good thing, too. People like you can't be alone."  
"People like me?"  
"Lost souls. Fugitives. They do it on purpose, they screw with your head. Make sure that you don't get far if you manage to get away from them."  
"Who are you talking about?" Tails was growing distressed. "What did they do to me?"  
"The Armada. Look, this is Dale."  
He lumbered out of the scrubland. The stranger who'd been introduced as _Dale_ was an enormous mobian wolf, who Tails found to be fairly intimidating. He wished that he knew these people as well as they told him he did. Dale grinned and showed too many teeth. "Hello," he said.  
"You've been a slave to them," Dalziel explained, "Your memory's been extracted. You're on a loop, every few minutes you forget everything you know."  
"Why would somebody do that?" Tails asked.  
"Because this way, if you do manage to escape from them, it's only a few minutes before you forget what you were doing, who you were running from, and where you were going to go. You can't organise, you can't plan, you can't think. Prison of the mind, little buddy."  
"Wait, wait, this doesn't make any sense. I _do_ remember things, I remember how I got here, and why. Everything's perfectly clear until this morning."  
Dalziel stopped walking and looked him in the eye. "One thing you have to learn, kid," he said, "Don't trust your memories. They can do anything they want to you. Edit, delete or insert. You could be the crown prince of an empire, for all you know. They could make you think you're a chicken, if they really wanted to."  
Tails felt smothered, helpless. It would be impossible to rebut such accusations with facts about his life; if these people truly believed that memories could be controlled, then how could he argue? It was a frightening concept, and although he didn't quite believe it, he couldn't help exploring the implications, if it were all true. He wouldn't have been able to trust anything about himself, sort fact from fiction. The Freedom Fighters, Robotnik, the Aracks and Nails the Bat might have been digital lies manufactured in some laboratory. No, he couldn't believe his life was a fiction, that would be impossible to bear. This led to a bigger question, and one that was disturbingly difficult to answer:  
Were these people the crazy ones? Or was he?  
And if he was sane, then how would that explain his inability to recall the events leading up to this morning?  
"Why would you guys want to help me?" he asked.  
"Because it's the right thing to do. You're lucky that we're the ones who ran into you, a lot of people would just turn you in right away. There's a good sized reward on your head, you know. Take a look over that way, _those_ people are the ones you have to look out for. The _exiles_."  
Tails looked in the direction Dalziel was pointing, down below them in a wide and green valley, and he saw a cluster of buildings that seemed to be surrounded by tall wire fences, the kind they put around prisons. Outside the fences, dozens of people shambled about, like zombies, in torn and filthy clothing. Most of them were rooting through a pile of garbage.  
"Keep out of sight," Dalziel said in a low voice, "Don't go near them, they'll betray you just as sure as the sun rises in the east. They're monsters, every one of them."  
"Monsters," Dale reiterated, and growled low in his throat.  
"Who are they?" Tails asked, "I thought that the Kirandul mountains were uninhabited."  
"Yeah, well, things change, kid. There's a new management in town, and they're none too friendly."  
A terrible thought occurred to Tails. If this area of the world had been somehow violently overthrown, then... "Flightless Joe! Is he..."  
"He's fine. We're gonna get to him, Tails. Then we can try to fix up what's wrong with your head so you can get to thinking clearly again."  
"What if it _can't_ be fixed?"  
Dalziel smiled. "Oh, don't you worry about that. It can be fixed."  
Tails observed the people down below and found it harder to doubt Dalziel's story. Something had clearly been done to them, something horrible. They lurched about like there was no hope in their lives, they were clothed in the same manner of garbage they pawed through for sustenance. It was heartbreaking, and he had to close his eyes. It seemed he wouldn't have to travel as far as Kitsune Atole in order to find massive injustice. What was happening to the world?  
When Tails opened his eyes again, he couldn't seem to recall exactly what he was doing. Just a slip of the mind, he decided. A momentary lapse in reason. He had been travelling for days, after all.

---

**9:42 pm**

"No!" he shrieked, "_No! Remember this! Remember it, you stupid moron!_"  
"Tails!"  
"I have to _remember!_"  
"Tails, wake up!"  
He opened his tear-filled eyes and looked up at the fox kneeling above him. He didn't recognise the face he saw, illuminated in the light of the crackling fire.  
"Hunnh?"  
"Just a bad dream, kid. You were having a bad dream."  
"Who... who are you?"  
"You don't remember us," the fox replied, and smiled. "You never do."  
Tails thought he did, though. Somewhere deep down within his mind he harboured a recollection, like an adult might recognise a face from his childhood. Just a fragment, brief and insubstantial. He may have dreamed it.  
"Here, you must be hungry."  
Tails was handed a bowl of some horrid gruel that looked like it was dug out of the garbage. He screwed up his face just from the smell of it.  
"Sorry it's probably not what you're used to," the stranger said, "It's what we live on, outside of the hamster cage. Their garbage becomes our dinner. Don't worry, it's perfectly safe, we've been living on it for most of our lives. It grows on you."  
"Thanks," Tails replied. "Uhh... where... where are we..." His hand stole to his forehead, above his eye, where he felt a throbbing ache. It came away a little bloody.  
"We're safe," the fox told him, "We're friends. I'm Dalziel, this is Dale. We're going to help you get where you want to go."  
The one he called Dale was a massive wolf who sat back in the darkness, slurping up the slop that Dalziel had offered for dinner. Tails was glad he introduced him as a friend; he would hate to be that guy's enemy.  
"You're going to help me?"  
"Yeah, you need all the help you can get, in your condition. Or else you'd just be walking around in circles all the time until you got caught, which is pretty much exactly what they want."  
"_They?_"  
"Eat up. You need food."  
Tails was extremely hungry, which was probably best, because he would have to be very hungry to be able to come at this meal. He choked it down. It tasted like tomato and mud. Mostly mud.  
"We're going to set off in the morning," Dalziel told him, "This whole ordeal is going to be over for you soon."  
Tails touched the wound on his head again, tenderly. Perhaps all of this would be clearer tomorrow. With his belly full and his mind unhinged, all he wanted was to sleep it all off. There was no hurry, and he could trust these people. At least he hoped he could.  
Finding a comfortable spot to curl up, he closed his eyes and listened to the whispers and laughter of the strangers who had taken him in. He couldn't understand what they said, but wished that he could. Anything he could learn about how he came to be here and why, about who they were and why they wanted to help him, would be a good thing. Soon enough, he drifted off to sleep.  
Tails' dreams were filled with nonsensical images. He dreamed of a dark, monsterous squid that drifted through the sky, and black trucks driving across a field. He dreamed of his father, and of Uncle Tyler and Nightmare, of Sonic... and a tall, dark stranger in a decorated military uniform and a neat crest of plumage upon his head.

---

**1:00 pm**

Tails drew his arms and legs in and lay in the dirt, his eyes welling up with tears under his cupped hands, waiting for the pain to pass. When at last the burning knives subsided to a dull throb, he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked up at the two strangers sitting in front of him.  
"Hey there, kid," one of them said, "Gave yourself a pretty solid whack, there, didn't you."  
"I- I did?"  
"Yeah. Walked right into the wall, looked like you nearly knocked yourself out. You gotta watch out for things like that, in your condition. You okay?"  
"I think so. My... my condition?"  
The strangers, a fox and a wolf, helped him to his feet. The fox handed him a rag, and he put it against the wound above his eye. There was a small amount of blood.  
"Yeah," the fox said, "The memory thing. You don't remember us, you never do. It's how they keep you under control."  
"Huh... what?"  
"Never mind." The fox smiled. "We're friends. You stay with us, youll be fine."  
Tails did stay with them, unable to comprehend his situation enough to come up with any better course of action. The three of them camped in the crevice where he had awoken, and there they stayed, cycling through the same conversations again and again as Tails' memory continued to fail him. Every time his attention shifted, he looked back to find two complete strangers watching over him. Their presence, his situation, was a puzzle that he had to decode again and again.  
After night fell, they built a small bonfire, and the fox and the wolf set up crude cooking equipment with which to prepare some rations. They didn't look very appetising to Tails, scraps mostly, garbage, the kind of swill that you feed to farm animals. He was desperately hungry, though.  
Tails sat down near the fire to warm himself, and his hand touched something cold and hard in the dirt. It wasn't a rock, it was something metallic. He observed it under the glow of the fire and saw that it was some kind of robot or toy, a little metal pig with a face and lightbulb-eyes. Lying near it was a tiny key.  
"What's this?" he asked.  
"I dunno," replied the fox, who had repeatedly introduced himself as _Dalziel_. "You've been carrying it around with you."  
Tails noticed a hole on the back of the thing that was just the right size and shape for the key to fit inside. A wind-up toy? He inserted the key and began to turn it. After a few good cranks, he put it down in the dirt. The robot sprang to life, shook its little head and looked up at him. The two lightbulb eyes flickered on, and the toy, miraculously, began to speak.  
"Hey there, Buckaroo! Glad you finally decided to crank me up."  
"Uh, hello," Tails replied, "Where'd you come from?"  
"Well, you know, I really wish I could write the answer on a note and pin it to your forehead, but I don't have any hands."  
Dalziel wandered over and kneeled beside Tails. "What have you got here?" he asked, "This... this is one of their machines. How did you get this?"  
"I don't know," Tails replied, "I've never seen it before."  
"You _think_ you've never seen it before."  
The robot looked up at the other fox. "Who are _you?_"  
Dalziel ignored it. "It's an old model," he said, "Really old. Didn't think they were still around. This thing looks broken."  
"Do you know these guys?" the robot asked Tails.  
He looked back and forth between the fox and the wolf, who were laughing about something while they cooked over the fire. Already his familiarity with them was beginning to fade into the mists of his confused mind. "I... I think so..."  
"Listen, Buckaroo, I think these guys are bad news."  
"I think _you_ should shut your trap," Dalziel called from the other side of the bonfire.  
The robot opened a compartment on its back and something poked out of it - a set of rotor blades. They spun rapidly around, and to Tails' shock the little machine took off and began to circle around his head.  
Something stirred in the depths of his mind, a flash of recollection, a flurry of images that he couldn't quite place. He _had_ seen this little machine before. He wasn't sure when or where, but a fragment of memory was ingrained in there like a scrap of food caught between the teeth.  
"Is your name _Tock?_" he asked.  
"_Yes! Yes!_" the robot replied, "You're doing it, Buckaroo, you're remembering! You're getting it back!"  
"I don't... I don't quite... I can't..."  
"Listen. Listen to me for a minute, _focus_, can you do that? It's important."  
"Yeah..."  
"These guys are bad news," the robot seemed almost frantic, now, "They're going to _lead you into a trap_, Buckaroo, they're after the _bounty_, they're _tricking_ you, you have to get away from them before it's too late! You have to-"  
Something struck the robot out of the air. It let out an awful crunch and an electronic squeal, fell to the ground and didn't get back up again. Tails looked up to see Dalziel standing over him with a large rock in his hand.  
"Hey-"  
The older fox slapped him hard across the face. He cried out and tried to scramble away, but Dalziel grabbed him by the jaw with crushing strength, so hard that the fingers dug into his flesh. Tails looked down in his pain and saw that the hand that was grasping him was a hideous three-fingered talon. The wolf was standing by him too, now, and growling deep in his throat, thick ribbons of foaming spit dribbling down his face.  
"You made a friend, did you?" Dalziel roared in Tails' face, and pulled so close to him that Tails could smell his rancid breath. "You've _got_ no friends, _retard_, nobody likes you. Understand me?" He threw Tails onto his back. The younger fox tried to scramble to his feet but the wolf put a foot on his chest and pushed him down again.  
"You're our lucky ticket, kid," Dalziel said, "They're gonna let us back into the hamster cage. No more scavenging, no more starvation. It's luxury all the way for the two of us, while you're getting cut up in a little room without windows. All we gotta do is turn you in. No worries, who cares about one stupid little retard?"  
"Stupid... little... _retard!_" the wolf added between wet snarls.  
"We're gonna lead you right into the slaughtering pen," the fox continued, "It's gonna be easy as pie, know why? Because you're as dumb as wet cement. I could cut both your ears off right now and feed them to you, I could beat you until my fists hurt, and five minutes later _you wouldn't remember a freakin' thing!_"  
"I'll remember..." Tails choked, "I'll _remember you!_ I have to!"  
"Go ahead! Just go ahead and try. We're gonna be best buddies again before I can click my fingers."  
Tails closed his eyes and mustered all his energy, but he could already feel it slipping away. "No!" he shrieked, "_No! Remember this! Remember it, you stupid moron!_"  
"Tails!"  
"I have to _remember!_"  
"Tails, wake up!"  
He opened his tear-filled eyes and looked up at the fox kneeling above him. He didn't recognise the face he saw, illuminated in the light of the crackling fire.  
"Hunnh?"  
"Just a bad dream, kid. You were having a bad dream."

---

**12:11**

Tails looked around. He seemed to be standing on the edge of some kind of field, and far ahead of him he could see a group of buildings.  
There were some people milling about here, too. This shocked him, because as far as he had known, the Kirandul mountains were uninhabited except for Flightless Joe and his airport. Since when had there been a settlement here? For that matter, since when had there been enough _space_ to build a settlement here?  
It dawned on him that he was a little bit lost. He was going to have to ask one of these people where he was. He lifted his hand to attempt to get somebody's attention when he realised he was holding something. A small toy of some kind, a little robot that somewhat resembled a golden pig. It felt hollow. A piggy-bank? Tails checked the back of it for a coin-slot, but he only found a small circular hole. He held up his other hand and found that he was holding a key.  
"_Hey! Hey you!_"  
Tails spun around and saw somebody running up to him. At least he was running as well as he seemed able, which was really little more than an enthusiastic hobble. It was a rabbit, an elderly mobian with a jacket so badly worn that it was almost a cloak of tattered rags. He moved with the assistance of a large stick as a crutch, and it wasn't difficult to see why. His left leg was malformed, only about a quarter of the mass of the other, shrivelled and folded up as a useless and bothersome attachment. Tails instantly felt sorry for him, knowing as he did all too well the pain of deformity.  
"Hello, there," he said to the stranger.  
"What you got?" the rabbit asked with an almost demanding tone, "What you got there? Can you share? I'm so hungry, mister, I'm so hungry... Them hoodlums back there, they took my..."  
Tails held up the dead robot, and the stranger was instantly downhearted. His ears fell over his face. "Not food," he whimpered, "Nothing to eat."  
"Sorry," Tails replied, "Hey look, I'll share some of my supplies with you, all right?" He reached behind his shoulder but frowned when he grasped only air. Where had his pack gone? When had he put it down?  
There was a gathering of people around him, now. About a dozen of the wanderers had congregated nearby, and Tails saw immediately that something was very wrong. Every one of them looked homeless and ragged, and many of them had some kind of deformity or mutation. Some worse than others. Some _much_ worse.  
"I think that's the kid," somebody said.  
"The recalled one," someone else added, "The one they want back..."  
Tails was about to say something when one of the strangers thrust forward and made a grab for him. He shrieked and backed away, and immediately a fight broke out among the people, a violent brawl that seemed to focus on which of them should be able to grab him first. Deformed hands reached out for him, clawed at the air near his face, as the strangers wrestled with each other to get to him. Tails stumbled backward away from the pack and fell over, terrified. These people were crazy! All of them, completely out of their minds, and for some reason they had focused their deranged desperation on harming him in particular. Perhaps they wanted to make him like them, cut him up until he was so deformed he barely looked mobian anymore, make him into a slobbering, wailing maniac.  
Somebody grabbed his arm and he yelled and shook them off, but more hands clutched at his arms and shoulders, held tight, dragged him to his feet as he kicked and fought.  
"Tails! _Tails!_"  
The use of his name calmed him down, and when his captors relinquished his hold he turned to them expecting friends. Alas they were just two more strangers - a fox and a wolf - and although they knew his name they appeared just as filthy and mange-ridden as any of the other maniacs, though they were free of visible deformity.  
"Come with us," the fox insisted, "Quickly, while they're too busy killing each other to notice you're gone."  
"Who are you?" Tails demanded.  
"A couple of guys. Look, you can go back to _them_ if you prefer. Or, you can come with us." The fox held his hand out, and Tails saw that he was indeed the victim of a physical deformity. Instead of a normal hand, the fox had a thin, three-fingered _talon_. Tails didn't touch it, but he did take the invitation. He fled with the two strangers as they ran from the chaos in the field, and eventually they came to rest in a rocky ditch.  
"What was with those people?" Tails asked, "Why did they want to hurt me?"  
The fox and the wolf just looked at each other and started to laugh, and Tails found himself once again a little concerned for his safety. He wasn't sure the intentions of these two were any better than those of the others.  
"They don't wanna harm ya'," the fox said after a while, "They just want the reward, same as we do. Heck of an opportunity. Doesn't come around too often."  
"What... _reward?_"  
"You got quite a price on your head, kid," the wolf snarled, and they both laughed again.  
"_Reincorporation!_" the fox exclaimed, "It's like winning the lottery, and you're the winning ticket, retard. Who could have imagined? Glad I didn't kill you after all."  
Tails gulped. Both of these strangers were significantly larger than he was, especially that wolf. _He_ looked as though he could snap Tails' neck between his jaws like a popsicle stick. And he would have to run past both of them to escape.  
"Who has a price on my head?" he asked. _Who even knows I'm here?_  
"Oh, shut up," the fox replied, and kicked dirt at him. "They want you alive, but we can still rough you up if you get annoying. No point telling you anything anyway, you're just gonna forget it in five minutes."  
"I think I have a right to know who-" Tails was cut off when the older fox darted forward and sucker-punched him in the side of his head. He fell over, clutching his eye. The blow had hurt more than it should have, due to a large bruise around his eye that he didn't even realise was there.  
"See if you remember that one," the attacker barked (and the wolf howled in laughter), "When I'm punching you, it means 'shut up'."  
Tails drew his arms and legs in and lay in the dirt, his eyes welling up with tears under his cupped hands, waiting for the pain to pass. When at last the burning knives subsided to a dull throb, he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked up at the two strangers sitting in front of him.  
"Hey there, kid," one of them said, "Gave yourself a pretty solid whack, there, didn't you."

---

**8:33 am**

Tails watched his reflection in the clear stream. The water was so pristine and lovely that he could have gazed into it for hours. Perhaps he had. He blinked hard, twice, shook his head and looked up at the mountains ahead of him. Well, enough of this; time to push on.  
He hiked through the wilderness for some time, making good ground. It would be good to finally arrive at Joe's place; it seemed he'd been travelling forever.  
Eventually he arrived at a vantage point where he had a good view of the area below, but what he saw didn't make a lot of sense to him. In fact, it was downright puzzling.  
There were _buildings_ down there. A lot of them, and all constructed on land that was flat enough to fit a whole settlement. This didn't conform to his understanding of the local geography; the Kirandul Range was supposed to be all rocky mountains, cliffs and untamed wilderness, no green sprawling valleys and certainly no room for habitation. At least, such was his understanding. Obviously he'd been wrong, for someone had cleared enough land to find a comfortable use for it here. That was the thing about people, they could find a way to live pretty much anywhere.  
Tails figured this was a pretty serendipitous discovery and a good opportunity for a decent meal and a rest, assuming the people were friendly. At least it didn't look like it was an Arack settlement. He began to make his way down the mountain in the direction of the buildings.  
It was about noon when he set foot on level ground again. The day was just beginning to grow hot and the effort of the journey was making him sweaty and itchy. About time for a break, he thought, not a moment too soon.  
"_Hey, Buckaroo!_"  
Someone was shouting out, presumably to him, and he turned around to answer whoever was greeting him. He didn't see anyone though. It was like a ghost had been yelling out from a veil of invisibility. Then he heard a second shout, coming from above him.  
"Up here!"  
Tails looked up and found something small and strange hovering over his head. It was almost like a tiny helicopter with a face and two bright headlight-eyes. It was this thing, some kind of robot, that had been calling out to him, and provided his first impression of what kind of folk he was dealing with. Although clearly sophisticated, this robot was old and showing its age with its tarnished hull and chipping paint. Stranger still was its apparent method of conveyance. In front of the rapid-spinning rotor blades that kept this thing afloat was a small slowly turning key. Was it possible that this thing was _clockwork?_  
"Glad to see you're all right!" it exclaimed, "Thought you'd been caught for sure! Thought I'd have to find some way to rescue you, you dolt."  
"Hello?" Tails waved at the peculiar thing. He couldn't help but think it was familiar, where had he seen something like this before? "Maybe you can help me," he offered, "I'm not entirely sure where I am."  
"Of course you're lost, you haven't had me around to keep you wound up!" the flying robot barked back at him, "You can't go running off on your own like that. We've got to stick together! I've got to keep you around to wind me back up as well."  
"I don't understand what you're talking about."  
"Look, guy, you've got a problem with your noggin. Turn around, count to three, and your hard drive formats itself. The data just won't take, Buckaroo. You need a RAM upgrade, you're low on memory."  
Tails touched his forehead and found that his right eye was pretty badly bruised. He tendered it, wondering idly what happened. "Did you say there's something wrong with my _head?_"  
"It's what's inside your head, I'm afraid. To be quite blunt, you have the memory of a brain-damaged goldfish, and it's been causing you a bit of strife."  
Tails laughed. "Sorry, but if I had a problem with my memory, I'd definitely know about it."  
"You did know, but you've clearly forgotten."  
"I don't know what kind of game this is, but-"  
"_Look._" The little machine sounded like it was becoming flustered, if that were at all possible. "You've been wandering around lost all day because you can't remember where you've been and where you haven't. Walking in circles, going nowhere."  
"I've been hiking all day, I've travelled miles."  
"You've come about five kilometres! In six hours! Last time I saw you we were right around that bend!"  
Tails looked over his shoulder but didn't see anything familiar.  
"But we've never met."  
"We've met heaps! You just-"  
"Right, I don't remember."  
"Exactly."  
"Look, if what you were saying was true, I'd have missing places in my memory, right? Empty spaces I can't account for. But I don't. I remember everything as clear as day, I can tell you everything right up to how I came to be in the mountains and why. There's nothing missing. Take a look, I'll show you where I've been. I'll-"  
He reached for his pack to find the map he'd brought, but it was only now that he realised how unusually light his load was. His pack was missing.  
"Lost something?" the robot asked.  
Tails frowned at the little machine. "Who _are_ you?" he demanded.  
"Just a concerned fellow exile looking out for your interests. After all, who else is going to look out for mine?"  
"And we _know_ each other." Tails still had trouble figuring out which one of them was crazy. He still placed his bets on the robot, but perhaps this was just a symptom of a crazy person's inability to recognise their own craziness? If he couldn't trust his own memories, his own _brain_, then what could he trust? A dirty old worn-down clockwork robot?  
"Well, not very well," the robot replied, "But we make do. Now, we really should shake a leg and get somewhere safe before... uh-oh..."  
The robot seemed to be having trouble flying all of a sudden. It was shaking and faltering mid-air. "What's wrong?" Tails asked.  
"Winding down... mayday... need a... crank..."  
With that, the thing's eyes flickered and went dead, and it fell out of the sky like a rock, landing dully at Tails' feet and not moving again. The key in its back fell out in the grass.  
Tails looked down at it for a moment, trying to process what he'd just heard. He reached down and picked up the robot, jiggling it in his hand, listening to it rattle. He picked up the key and inspected it too. If this was some kind of joke, he didn't get it.  
Where was he, anyway?  
Tails looked around. He seemed to be standing on the edge of some kind of field, and far ahead of him he could see a group of buildings.

---

**7:14 am**

Tails tore through the thick scrub for almost an hour, his breath heaving in his chest. When he burst out on the other side, he saw the mountains ahead of him and slowed to a stop. He turned his head, panting, to make sure that his persuer had been lost, though he couldn't remember who or what had been chasing him.  
He'd been scratched and cut up by stiff branches, and his muscles ached. How long _had_ he been running? It was stupid to be so afraid of something that he couldn't remember having seen. Maybe the mountain air was getting to him. Maybe it was time to sit down and have something to eat.  
Tails reached for his pack and froze. His back was bare. The pack he'd been hauling, his tent and his supplies, were all gone. The only things he was carrying with him were the shoes on his feet.  
Had he dropped his pack when he'd been spooked by whatever it was that he'd seen back there? He looked back, into the scrub, and realised that nothing looked familiar to him. It was like he'd been running with his eyes closed. He couldn't remember anything that had happened to him.  
"Great, Tails," he muttered bitterly, "That's great. Good job."  
So, now what? He had no food, no shelter, no map, and no idea how much further he had to travel. There was nothing to do but sit here, in the leaves and the dirt, and think. Hopefully his memory would return and he might have some chance of locating his belongings.  
Unfortunately, the memories did not come back. In fact, they seemed to be fading. He sat for a long time, listening to the birds and just thinking, but only fragments came back to him, meaningless words and images caught in a contextual void.  
He had the word _overdraw_ floating around inside his mouth like bitter scraps, and he said it aloud in case it offered some kind of insight. It didn't. Nor did the image of black trucks cruising across a savannah make any sense, or the surreal image of what appeared to be a giant squid flying above the forest, the nightmarish juxtaposition of a certified lunatic. Had he dreamed that? What would a psychiatrist make of it?  
He'd lost some amount of time, that was for certain. How much, he didn't know, and it was about this that he began to fret. How could _time_ just dissolve? Just melt through the cracks and vanish?  
(you're winding down again, buckaroo)  
Whose was the shrill, coppery voice that whispered in his ear and called him _buckaroo_? What were the two tall, white towers that he saw in his mind?  
Tails heard running water nearby and crawled a few metres to find a clear stream. The water was pristine, and he cupped both hands and drank deep. Before he looked up he saw his own reflection in the water and gasped. He looked horrid. He had a black eye that he couldn't remember receiving, like somebody had clocked him with a rock. There was dried blood in his hair and his fur. He was a warzone.  
_But I've only been hiking_, he told himself, _That's all, just a hike through the mountains!_  
(no, you've done so much more. you just can't remember because you're winding down like an old clockwork robot. and now it's happening again.)  
"I don't want to wind down," he said aloud, "Please. I just want to remember."  
But fate was merciless. As he sat before the stream and looked into the slowly trickling water, his memory recycled itself, he wound down and lost himself again.  
Tails watched his reflection in the clear stream. The water was so pristine and lovely that he could have gazed into it for hours. Perhaps he had. He blinked hard, twice, shook his head and looked up at the mountains ahead of him. Well, enough of this; time to push on.

---

**6:30 am**

"I'm not in the right place," Tails suddenly realised, though he had trouble grasping the full implications of this revelation. "This isn't where I'm supposed to be."  
The feeling was somewhat akin to if he'd opened the door of his home one morning and found another country outside. His brain did not corroborate with his eyes; they disagreed quite completely, and he felt his whole body waver and weaken from the shock of it.  
This was not the Kirandul Range. This was an entirely different landscape. As though he'd unknowingly stepped into some rift in space that had transported him halfway across the world. The land was too flat for this terrain, too tropical and green for this climate. He was more than just lost, he was completely displaced.  
There were people down there, too. The Kirandul mountains were uninhabited, but the fields ahead were swarming with dark-clothed mobians, some of whom seemed, distressingly, to be carrying weapons.  
"This is too weird," Tails said to himself, and shook his head. "There's some explanation for this. I'm not crazy. There's an obvious answer, something I'm missing."  
(you won't figure it out, buckaroo, 'cause tock says you're winding down too fast)  
Something flew overhead. Tails looked up and saw what he thought at first to be jet planes flying in formation, far above him. It was an illusion of perspective - the things weren't large and far away, they were tiny and close. A triangular pattern of seven small blue and white machines flew over him and then peeled off in different directions. He couldn't see how they were propelled.  
This place was alien to him. Its inhabitants were alien to him. He wanted desperately to go down there and speak to them, gain some insight into his exact location, but their weapons frightened him. Their motives were a mystery - what were they _doing?_ Searching, it seemed, for something... or someone.  
There were vehicles, too. Strange dark-coloured trucks, a few dozen of them and all identical, slowly driving in a linear procession behind the people who looked like they composed some kind of military.  
Something else was flying around up there, something that didn't look like it rightfully belonged in the sky. It looked like it was more suited to the depths of the ocean, a big black jellyfish or a squid, flying gracefully over it all in somewhat of a figure eight formation, long organic-looking tentacles trailing behind it. Tails could have believed, given the already bizarre circumstances, that this was some kind of living creature, if not for the radar dish and two bullhorns that stuck out the front of it like antennae. A message was booming from the squid-machine that could probably be heard for miles in every direction.  
"**This is Overdraw. All exiles are to report for inspection immediately. A recall order has been placed on one of your number. The location of this subject is to be revealed to us immediately. Information leading to the retrieval of this subject may be rewarded with reincorporation with the quarantine sector.**" From here, the message repeated.  
_Overdraw_, Tails thought, _I know that word. I know that name._ He couldn't think how, but it registered danger with him. Something about this entire situation set off warning bells deep within him as though he'd been granted some kind of extrasensory instinct to warn him away from these people. Somehow he felt that the subject they sought, this _exile_, was him. He didn't feel particularly interested in giving himself up to find out what they wanted.  
So he ran. Though it seemed likely that the strangers possessed more than enough resources to flush him out from wherever he may hide, it was certainly preferable to try and evade them than to give up. After all, he already had a lot of things to worry about without this on his plate.  
He just hoped that none of those strange flying machines had detected him. The technology of these people was obviously fairly sophisticated.  
_If only I knew where I was,_ he thought, _If only I knew which way to run._  
It crossed his mind that, at some stage, he had been drugged and kidnapped. How would he escape from a foreign, alien land? Who had brought him here in the first place? He ran without direction or goal, seeking only to shelter from dangers that were already fading from his memory. He just ran, and found cover in a patch of vegetation at the far end of the field.  
Tails tore through the thick scrub for almost an hour, his breath heaving in his chest. When he burst out on the other side, he saw the mountains ahead of him and slowed to a stop. He turned his head, panting, to make sure that his persuer had been lost, though he couldn't remember who or what had been chasing him.

---

**6:00 am**

_What am I looking for?_ The images ran before his eyes too quickly for Tails to grab a hold of any one of them. His quest, his mission, his _destiny_ lay before him. But what was it? What was it? He ran a hand over his eyes as though this was some bizarre dream he had to awake from. _What am I looking for?_  
It was not an easy answer. Did he intend to fill the shoes that Sonic had left empty? Or did his loyalty lie entirely with his father, someone who he barely even remembered? Perhaps a fair degree of both. Tails felt the weight of responsibility for the plight of those who had protected him throughout his life. Many had fought against his ingratitude and stubbourn abrasiveness in order to provide him some semblance of a safe and decent life. Many had died through the course of doing so. Maybe, if he turned out to be something great, he could convince himself that it had all been worth it. If he completed his father's work, then the great Trevor Prower wouldn't have died in vain. Maybe if he did something great he could turn out not to just be a useless burden of a two-tailed freak. Maybe.  
_What am I looking for?_  
Meaning. Tails was looking for meaning in an unjust world.  
"Have I gotta wind you up again, Buckaroo?"  
Tails heard a voice speak to him from the left and he turned to find its source, but nobody was there. Just an empty patch of grass and clover. He frowned.  
"Up here! I'm up here!"  
Something was hovering just above his head. Tails looked up and saw it, an odd little robot with a spinning set of rotor blades for flight. It ogled down at him with flashing eyes.  
"Who are you?" He felt no need to brace himself for hostility, it was just shy of inconceivable that this little contraption with the pleasant, almost smiling face could find any way to hurt him. It let out a series of clicks and whirrs that might have constituted laughter.  
"Who am I! Just an insignificant part of a greater whole, my friend! Officially I'm known as Forty-Seven-K, but a good friend of mine always called me Tock. You can too!"  
"That doesn't really tell me anything," Tails replied, "_Who are_ you?"  
"Nobody any more," said Tock cryptically, "Neither are you! Just Exile One and Exile Two. You've gotta stop thinking in terms of _being_ somebody. Why bother? There's no jumping back into the gene pool once you've been ousted."  
"What are you talking about? I _am_ somebody! I'm Miles Prower, son of Trevor!"  
"Nope, nope," the robot insisted, "Exile, son of Nobody, that's you, Buckaroo." Tock swooped around to look Tails directly in the eyes. "What _are_ you looking for?"  
"My father's people have been imprisoned," Tails replied, "_My_ people. I'm going to set them free."  
"_You're_ going to set them free? How are you going to achieve that?"  
Tails considered for a moment. "I don't know."  
"You don't know! You don't know! Then why even try?"  
"Because it's my responsibility."  
The little robot laughed again. This made Tails a little angry.  
"Look," he said sharply, "You don't know anything about honour and resposibility, you're just a dumb little machine. I don't even know why I'm bothering to tell you any of this, I don't know who you are."  
"I already told you, Buckaroo, I'm nobody."  
"If you're nobody, then buzz off. Leave me alone."  
"You need me."  
"Why would I possibly need you?"  
"Because I can _hear them._"  
"Hear who?"  
The robot's voice changed to loud radio static, and then another voice emerged. It was a tinny, dirty sound like a poorly received radio broadcast. It sounded like a police or military report.  
"This is Unit B, commencing search of Quadrant Seventeen. No sightings of target at present."  
Tails had no idea who had sent out the signal, or indeed why anybody's military would be out here in the Kirandul ranges.  
"What's the 'target'?" he asked the little robot.  
"_You_ are." Tock laughed and spun around. "And they're close, they're very close. That's why you need me, unless you like being cut up for science."  
Tails didn't even know where to begin trying to comprehend this. "That's crazy," he said, "That's a load of garbage, there's nobody hunting me. Nobody even knows I'm here. Why would they want to cut me up?"  
"Beats me. Unfortunately you did _something_ to catch their attention, and that's strange in itself because they _never_ care about exiles. We'll probably never know, 'cause you keep winding down, same as me. In any event, stick by me and you'll do fine, Buckaroo, just peachy."  
"I'm not going to stick by you," Tails replied, "I don't trust you. I'll make my own way, thanks very much." He turned away and deliberately left in the opposite direction to that towards which the robot was trying to lead him.  
"No!" Tock shouted after him, and zipped around in front of him to cut him off. "That's the wrong way! That's where they _are!_"  
Tails batted it away and continued onward, defiant. He didn't know what kind of game he was being sucked into, but he certainly wasn't going to be led into an ambush by something that looked like it might have been designed and put together by Robotnik during his infant years. The robot followed him for a little while as he climbed a hill, and shouted at him incessantly, until finally it reached a point where it seemed unwilling to follow any further.  
"_You'll see!_" it called, "_You'll find them! And you won't even know I was right because you'll just wind right down again! I'll find you later, Buckaroo, and talk some sense into you! You'll see!_"  
"Yeah, yeah," Tails muttered, "You're a few sprockets short of an internal combustion engine, pal."  
He rounded the crest of the hill and slowed his pace when he finally saw what was ahead of him. The landscape was quite vastly different from what he had expected. There were no mountains ahead of him, only plains and forests, modest hills and scrubland. Even stranger, there were people down there. Quite a few people. He squinted to make them out but the rising sun was in his eyes.  
"I'm not in the right place," Tails suddenly realised, though he had trouble grasping the full implications of this revelation. "This isn't where I'm supposed to be."

---

**5:50 am**

"They're coming! Quick! Follow me! No time! No time!"  
Tails looked around and saw some kind of robot buzzing around his head; a small, dirty, gold-painted thing with a rotor blade that kept it airborne. At first he was too startled to move or respond, but the flying thing was so insistant that he found himself following it anyway. The strange robot zipped into a ditch, and Tails leaped after it, rolling a little and staining his knees on the grass.  
"What's going on?"  
"Shoosh!"  
Looking up, he saw more of the little robot things; different ones, a whole flock of them. They didn't use rotors to fly, and they didn't have the likeness of faces, but they looked otherwise like upgraded versions of the thing sitting in the ditch with him, like big blue and white electric shavers cutting through the breeze. In a few moments they were gone, their whirring faded away, and Tails was left alone with whatever had brought him here.  
"That was close!" the little robot said, "Stick with me, bucko, and you'll do fine."  
"Great," Tails replied, "So, who or what are you? And what were those other things?"  
The robot clicked and beeped, its little jaw, nothing but an arc of metal on a hinge, flapped under its flashing eyes. "It happened again, didn't it! Golly gee, you wind down faster than I do!"  
"_What_ happened?"  
"Your memory! Your brain, your central processing unit. You're caught on a loop, little buddy, you're thinking around in circles. Think about it... you've forgotten, haven't you. Everything that's happened before."  
Tails was about to protest, but his breath caught in his throat. There _was_ a certain something missing. It was like he'd walked into a movie theatre after the film had already started.  
"It's okay," the robot said, apparently having read the confusion on his face, "Just a faulty spring, that's all. Happens to the best of us. Mine's supposed to last for days, but there's really no telling how long I'm gonna keep ticking. A day, an hour, a minute, it's always a surprise. That's why we've gotta stick together, buckaroo. We've gotta be around to wind each other back up."  
"Wind each other up," Tails repeated with some humour. "Right. And what's going to happen to us otherwise?"  
"We'll get caught, of course. They'll melt me down and cut you to pieces, that's the way the Armada work. They'll take us _there_."  
The robot turned and faced to the left, and Tails followed its gaze.  
There was some kind of building in the hills in the distance. Two white towers stretched to the sky, gleaming through the foliage, and it was obvious that they were based among a much larger complex. Tails was quite taken aback that he hadn't noticed this before, it was quite stunningly obvious.  
"We're exiles, now," the robot said, "The two of us. We'll need each other if we're going to survive. That's how most of the exiles live, you see, they pair off, or chances are they don't make it."  
"Exiles..." Tails whispered, staring at that brilliant white building. "Wait a second... where am I? I'm not-"  
"Survival of the fittest, my friend. That's all."  
"-I'm not in the mountains, I'm-"  
"Better follow me, Buckaroo. What are you looking for?"  
_What am I looking for?_ The images ran before his eyes too quickly for Tails to grab a hold of any one of them. His quest, his mission, his _destiny_ lay before him. But what was it? What was it? He ran a hand over his eyes as though this was some bizarre dream he had to awake from. _What am I looking for?_

---

**5:30 am**

Tails looked up to try to pin down the source of the bizarre sound, and that was when he saw the towers.  
Two white towers standing out above the trees a long way off, on the side of a hill. It looked like there was some kind of castle over there, a great white castle. But that didn't make any sense; there was no such building in these mountains, not as far as Tails knew.  
Then again, how _was_ he to know? He didn't know every inch of this area. Perhaps someone did live here - Joe did, after all.  
But in a _castle_?  
It definitely wasn't a ruin. It was too well-kept. He decided he would ask Joe about it, when they met. He still had quite a way to travel.  
But which way?  
Tails was downhearted to realise that he wasn't sure which direction he'd been travelling. The towers had distracted him and he'd lost his head. No matter, he reached for his compass... and discovered he didn't have it.  
Stop. He stood in place and stared out over the hills and trees with his brain turning somersaults inside his head. There was something very strange happening here, he knew that much. It was as though a part of his memory had been taken and all he had left were these strange white towers... He was drowsy, his muscles bruised.  
A sound, distant at first, caught his attention. It was a flat metallic grinding and whooping, something he couldn't identify at all, a noise so alien that he couldn't help but search the horizon for its origin. But the sky was blue and flawless. The sound reached a screeching climax as something moving at a great velocity changed direction very suddenly in mid-air - and collided with Tails' head.  
The fox yelled and fell over backward, shielding his face too late as whatever had hit him had already bounced off and fallen to the ground. It hit _hard_, like a thrown rock, and a blinding pain ripped through his skull momentarily. He sat down and cupped his right eye with both hands. Luckily it didn't appear that he was bleeding or that his eye was damaged, but it would bruise.  
Tails looked around for the weapon that had been used against him. What he saw was the last thing he expected to find - a dirty little metal toy, a mechanical doll about the size of a large hamster, upside-down in the grass. Beside it was a novelty key, like the kind that was used to wind up old clocks. He picked up the toy in one hand, the key in the other, and held them both up at eye level. The toy stared blankly at him with unseeing eye-lenses, and the hinge that served as a parody of a mouth hung open.  
Already, Tails had forgotten the towers. He sat with his back to them, observing with extreme interest the little mechanical oddity he held. His fascination with such things commanded his attention, and curiously he inserted the key into the little hole in the thing's back and gave it a generous wind-up.  
As soon as he let go and the key began to tick backward on the tension of the spring inside, the little robot came alive. It kicked its legs about with such vigour that Tails dropped it again, and it rolled about in the grass, spluttering and whirring.  
"Got you!" it declared, "Clocked you a good one right over the head, didn't I! Serves you right, it does! Serves you just right!"  
Tails was more than a little shocked that the robot could speak. This surprised him so much that he wasn't even enraged by the 'bot's hostility. He just gazed on while the thing ranted and reasserted itself.  
"What do you think about _that_, huh?" the robot asked.  
"Think about what?" Tails replied after a moment, half-wondering whether he was halluscinating after his blow to the head.  
"I gotcha _back_, didn't I!" the robot retorted.  
"Got me back? I didn't do anything to you..." Tails, with a grunt, picked himself up from the grass. "I don't know who - _what_ - you are. I've never seen you before."  
"You took a swipe at me! You did!"  
"You've got me confused with someone else."  
To his further surprise, the robot reared up and sprouted what appeared to be a tiny set of rotor blades out of its back. With an electronic whir, it lifted up off the ground and began to circle Tails' head like a giant beetle.  
"No mistake!" it insisted, "You've got a problem in your head if you can't remember yesterday!"  
Tails looked around at the unfamiliar landscape before him, and ran his hand over his face. _Could_ he remember yesterday? His memories seemed loosely assorted in unlabeled folders inside his mind. Some of his recent recollections could have happened an hour ago or a week prior, for all he could tell.  
"I don't-" he stammered, "I don't know where I _am_. I can't seem to... I can't remember..."  
"You've got a problem, buckaroo," the robot said, "Seems you've been rattled in the head. Wasn't because I hit you, neither."  
"You hit me?" Tails mumbled. He had a phantom pain around his right eye, but couldn't quite recall how it had happened.  
"Guess this makes us kind of kindred," the robot suggested, "In so far as that could be said for an exile and a remote robot. We've both got a problem with _winding down_ too fast, huh?"  
Tails sat down again, all at once feeling very dizzy and very homesick. He was lost in an alien place, and for all he knew he might never escape. An alien world with alien intelligences speaking incomprehensible fictions. Lost, drowning in the abyss of his own confusion.  
"What's _wrong_ with me?" he demanded, "I don't know where I _am!_"  
"Exiled," the robot said. "That's all you are, now. Me, too. Both of us. I've become obsolete too, you see. Found out when I tried to return... they've got these new models, brand spanking shiny new upgrades, no room for old Tock anymore. It's a pity, they have no personality, these new ones. All the same, all bland and dumb. See, _I_ was always unique. Now they wanna melt me down! Turn me into scrap! _Evolution_, they say. I can't return, no no."  
"I don't know what you're talking about..." Tails groaned behind his hands.  
"Talking about the Armada, buckaroo, which reminds me. I've heard word about you. They're after you. You've been tagged, little buddy, you've found your way onto their list. Dunno what you did, exactly, but you've caught their eye. If I were you, and I'm not, but if I was, I'd keep out of sight. And if you were me, you'd keep out of sight too. In fact, the two of us, being who we are, and not being each other, but ourselves, would be much advised to keep invisible."  
"The Armada..." Tails whispered. "Wait a second. I'm here..."  
The image of the Tornado, his beloved plane, flashed through his mind. Flightless Joe beside it, laughing. Just a flash, just an instant, a broken memory. An image not from his future but from his past... he had already been there, done that. Moved on.  
"I'm on the Kitsune Atole," he stammered, "I'm here already. I don't know how it happened, but-"  
"They're coming! Quick! Follow me! No time! No time!"

---

**5:18 am**

Tails slept well, and dreamed of adventures that he couldn't later recall.  
When he awoke to the caress of the warm sun, it took him a while to figure out where he was and what he had been doing.  
_The mountains. My quest. I have to find the airport. Overdraw..._  
He couldn't figure out what significance the word _overdraw_ held for him. Perhaps it was something he dreamed during the night, a fragment of a thought that had stayed with him through to his awakening. A bit of nonsense.  
And where was he, specifically? He was in a field of some sort, or a meadow. It didn't seem like the mountains at all, but that was where he knew he was.  
(Or _are_ you? Something doesn't seem right, Tails. You know it's not right, and the word _overdraw_ has something to do with it.)  
Never mind. He would figure it out in time, but for now, he needed to press forward. He needed to get to Joe's place. He needed to get to the Tornado 2. He reached down to pick up his bag so he could journey on and reassert himself.  
His bag wasn't there.  
(Had it _ever_ been there? Did you ever have it with you? Why does it seem like it was never there at all?)  
He distinctly remembered his supplies. He remembered packing them, carrying them, making meals and snacks on his way. And yet...  
A buzzing sound caught his attention, like a swarm of loud insects coming his way, and he instinctively sought shelter behind a tree. They did, after all, sound like very _big_ insects. The sound passed overhead, and he looked up through the foliage to see if he could catch a glance.  
The source was about seven or eight large shapes hovering close to the ground. What confused Tails was that they were too large to be insects of any kind, and too few to be a swarm. They moved with too much purpose, in a straight line and in formation like tiny jet airplanes.  
He watched them with equal parts awe and apprehension. He'd never seen such bizarre creatures, blue and white beetle-like things whose wings didn't move, who cut smoothly through the sky with only a buzzing to indicate their presence. There was only one dreadful possibility. These were robots. Robotnik's tyrannical rule over Westerica had ended long enough ago to assure that these were not remnants of his empire; in fact, he had attached such a stigma to the entire concept of robotics that such technology was now only used by those who cared not an iota about their reputation. Robots were so thoroughly feared that they were only used as a tool to that end.  
Tails knew what they were doing, too. They were scouting. He kept a low profile in case it was for him.  
Who did they belong to? He was close to the Arack homelands, but they did not look like the machines of the Empire. They were white with pastel blue streaks, almost like children's toys. They were unfamiliar to Tails, though he knew a lot about such things. This was a very disturbing discovery indeed.  
Maybe Joe knew what was going on. Maybe he'd seen something in his regular flights over this area. Or maybe he was in danger... or in trouble.  
A vision of his friend flashed through his mind. Joe's face, smiling, laughing... a recent vision.  
(already seen him)  
That was strange. It was strange for him to think that. Like as though he'd already been to see Joe. But if that were true, why wouldn't he remember it? Why wouldn't he have taken the Tornado, as he had planned?  
He shook his head to clear it. No, no, he had to stay focused. He had to- What was that buzzing noise?  
Tails looked up to try to pin down the source of the bizarre sound, and that was when he saw the towers.

---

**7:30 pm**

"Hey kid! You want something to eat?"  
Huh? Tails turned around to see who had spoken. Two strangers were sitting by a bonfire, and one of them was motioning for his approach.  
Tails realised first that, yes, he did indeed want something to eat. He was starving. But who were these people? Where was he, and how long had it been since nightfall?  
For lack of a better explanation, he decided that he must have been asleep, had dozed while resting from the long hike, and had slept through sundown. These two travellers had set up camp here, had spotted him but decided not to wake him. It made perfect sense... except for the fact that he didn't feel the least bit rested. He was, in fact, utterly exhausted. But he was willing to ignore this fact in light of greater evidence.  
The strangers were smiling at him, so he smiled back and walked over to join them.  
"Hey guys," he said, "Didn't see you there. I'd _love_ something to eat, if you're offering."  
One of the strangers, a fox, laughed at this, for some reason. He laughed long and hard. Tails, figuring he missed the joke, smiled and chuckled politely. The fox ribbed the other stranger, a wolf, with his elbow. The wolf was smiling too, but Tails wondered whether it was really a friendly smile.  
"Sure!" the fox exclaimed, "Plenty to go around. Plenty!"  
So Tails sat, and ate what was offered to him. He ate greedily, felt as though it was the first food he'd had in a week. But he'd been eating, hadn't he? He'd brought supplies.  
The two strangers stared at him intently through all of this. Tails didn't think he liked the way they stared. Especially the wolf, huge as he was, and rugged from hard living. It was almost a hungry gaze. It told him that, although they had fed him and provided him sanctuary, their true concern for his welfare was minimal. What was their motive? Were they drugging him for some depraved purpose? Though unbelievably presumptuous, and inconsiderate, as it was to think such morbid thoughts, it was impossible to rule out cannibalism when they were staring at him like this.  
He spoke in the hope of striking up some conversation and learning that they weren't bad guys at all. "So... where are you guys from?"  
The older fox laughed again, and turned instead to his associate, the rugged wolf. "See, Dale? I told you. He's totally buggered in the head."  
Tails frowned at this. "Huh?"  
"Nothing. Listen, kid, what brings you to the, uh... the Krandal mountains? What are you lookin' for?"  
"Kirandul," Tails corrected, "I'm looking for an airport. You might be able to tell me where to find it, actually."  
Another bark of laughter. He began to feel concerned that there was an inside joke at his expense that he wasn't privy to. He wondered if there was something green on his face.  
"An airport!" the stranger exclaimed, "Which one, kid? A lot of airports around here!"  
"Dozens," the wolf added.  
"_What?_" That didn't make any sense. "I'm looking for Flightless Joe, he owns an airstrip here somewhere."  
"Oh yeah, my good buddy Joe," the fox replied.  
Tails cocked an eyebrow. "You know him?"  
"Sure! We go way back."  
"Well great! Then you can tell me how to get there!"  
"Ohh... I don't think he wants to see you."  
The snide glance that the strangers shared at this point gave Tails the strong suspicion that he was being lied to quite thoroughly, and it made him furious. These jerks seemed to have thought they'd found a sucker, and they were toying with him for some unknown reason. He didn't have time for this garbage.  
"What do you mean he doesn't want to see me? You don't even know who I am."  
"Sure I do! Sure! Joe says to me, he says: 'I don't want that ugly Tails kid coming around here anymore. He's a retard.' Hey, his words, not mine."  
"Look, I don't know who you are," Tails snapped, "But if you think I'm just going to sit here and take this, you've got another thing coming. You can take your hospitality and shove it."  
He stood up and began to walk away. He heard the braying laughter of the strangers behind him and found himself growing angrier by the second. He was instantly ashamed of himself. How was he going to set his people free if he couldn't even handle a couple of regular bullies?  
"Hey! Hey, I didn't mean anything by it!" the fox shouted after him, still laughing. Already, Tails was starting to forget who was behind him, and from where his anger stemmed. He ran away from the strangers, who had faded into silhouettes in his mind, ghosts he may have imagined, and then they vanished entirely. Surrounded by the dark, he forgot everything but himself and his mission. His anger remained, emotional residue without context, and he fumed for a while before he settled down to sleep in a soft patch of ground. His hunger satified, his exhaustion was the most pressing of issues.  
Tails slept well, and dreamed of adventures that he couldn't later recall.

---

**7:09 pm**

Tails found a tree trunk in the darkness and hid behind it, panting and close to tears. He didn't have the energy for this. He was starving, he hurt all over, and he was exhausted. When he gathered the courage, he peered back.  
To his surprise, there was a campfire flickering nearby. He saw two mobians sitting by it. Perhaps they could offer him something to eat?  
Slowly he crept toward the camp, conscious that there was something dangerous nearby, though he couldn't seem to bring to mind what it was. Something was out there, in the dark. He had just been running from it. He would have to warn these two, as well.  
A fox and a wolf sat across from each other, on either side of the fire. The fox was cooking something in a pot. The smell of it made Tails' mouth water and his stomach growl like a wild animal.  
"Excuse me," he whimpered. Not loudly enough. He tried again. "_Excuse me?_"  
Both heads snapped around to look at him.  
"Can I- Can I have something to eat? Please?"  
There was no reply for a moment. Then the fox shrieked, picked up a knife, and launched himself at Tails.  
Not the welcome he was hoping for.  
"That's _it!_" the stranger yelled, "That's the last straw! I'm going to take your head off, you little rodent!"  
"Please!" Tails whimpered, and the other fox grabbed the fur around the scruff of his neck so hard that it felt like he was trying to tear it out.  
"I'll teach you to be a smart-aleck. I gave you two chances, that's two more than usual, and still you _push_ it, you keep _pushing_ it, and now you're going to lose blood."  
Tails felt the blade of the knife on his midsection. "_Please!_" he pleaded, "_I don't know what you're talking about! I've never seen you before! I've never met you!_"  
The fox was breathing hard, growling deep in his throat, but he stayed his hand. He looked confused, a little bewildered, and mercifully weakened his grip a little.  
"There something wrong with you, kid?" he asked.  
Tails didn't reply, just shook his head. The stranger narrowed his eyes, and after a moment he let the younger fox go, though he still held the knife out in front of him.  
The other stranger, the wolf, approached from behind.  
"You gonna bleed 'im, Dalziel?"  
"There's something funny about this kid," the fox said, "I think he's a retard or something. Says he doesn't recognise us, though he was right here all of five minutes ago."  
Though the immediate danger seemed to have passed, Tails wasn't too much more relieved, seeing as these strangers were clearly maniacs, or lunatics, or both. Why were they acting as though they knew him? He had never seen either of them before, so far as he could remember.  
"He's just messin' with you," the wolf growled, "Crikey. Are you gonna mess him up or am I?"  
"Just wait a second," 'Dalziel' snapped, and turned back to Tails. "You messin' with me, kid?"  
"I'm not messing with you," Tails assured, "I've never seen you before, either of you, I swear to God. Please, I'm just... I'm really hungry. And I think I'm lost, and... I just need something to eat."  
"You weren't here, just a few minutes ago," the fox pressed. "You weren't right here, standing where you are now, saying the same stupid things that you are now."  
"No! I wasn't!" They really had gone mad. Tails was about to produce an alibi, but his breath caught in his throat when he realised he couldn't really picture where it was that he _had_ been five minutes ago. Or one minute. It must have been the fear clouding his mind.  
The fox laughed. "Well kid, I tell you what. Either you have an identical twin brother roaming around these parts, or there's something gone wrong with your noggin."  
Tails wasn't sure he should further antagonise these people by insinuating that they were the crazy ones, but he couldn't quite figure out what they were implying.  
"There's nothing wrong with my head," he said. "What are you saying, that I've got amnesia? I remember who I am. I remember _where_ I am."  
"Oh yeah? And where are you?"  
"At the border of Kirandul, in the mountains." He was sure that the mountains themselves must be around here somewhere, though he couldn't make them out at night.  
"The _mountains?_" Dalziel barked, "Kiran-_what?_ Kid, I don't know where you _think_ you are, but you're not in any mountains... unless you call the old Peaks of Eastern Border _mountains_."  
Tails was becoming more confused by the moment. Talking with crazy people was a complicated business. Why couldn't he remember where he _really_ was?  
"I don't understand, Dalziel," the wolf complained, "The kid's screwing with us. We should just cut 'im and leave 'im."  
"No, no, this is too precious," the other one replied, "This is too _interesting_. Don't you see? The kid's head is spinning around in a loop. No wonder they let him outta the hamster cage, he's a total retard!"  
"So what?"  
"So, we can use this. Think about it. We can tell him any story we wanted, he'd have to believe it. Wouldn't matter what we told him, he'd just forget it afterward, right?"  
"I guess."  
"So this could be entertaining! Look, when it gets too old, you can cut him up, all right?"  
"Well, what are we gonna tell 'im?"  
Tails let the two of them argue it out while he considered the situation. He was quite sure that he didn't have a memory problem, but that would be easier to believe if he could actually remember what it was that he had been doing before he got here. In fact, he wasn't even sure he could remember getting here, didn't know if he could even recall the beginning of this conversation. Suppose it was true? Suppose he _did_ have parts of his memory missing. What would that imply? He might not have been where he thought he was. He might be even more lost than he knew. What could he do about it? He would have to _concentrate_. He would have to _make sure_ he remembered. He would have to-  
"Hey kid! You want something to eat?"  
Huh? Tails turned around to see who had spoken. Two strangers were sitting by a bonfire, and one of them was motioning for his approach.

---

**6:15 pm**

Tails had no compass apart from the sun, and with that as his guide, he hiked deep into the mountains in search of his destiny. It took him most of the day.  
He headed east, away from the sun, and just as it began to disappear behind him, he reached something inexplicable. Something that made his confused mind reel, revolt and retract right back into the depths of utter bewilderment.  
A clearing. A field. It led to a forest, which seemed to go on as far as he could see from this vantage point. No more mountains. But that was simply not possible.  
He looked behind him to see if he could find the sun, but it had gone behind the rocky cliffs. Still, even if he had only been going _vaguely_ east... the Kirandul range extended for _miles_. It was the deepest mountain range on the planet, and he had entered from the western side. Nobody had _ever_ hiked through it on foot. It was simply not possible. It would take weeks. How could he be looking into a clearing?  
Tails fell to his haunches and buried his face in his hands, peeking out from the gaps between his fingers. He was utterly, irredeemably lost. He knew his map was gone, his whole pack was gone. He had reached for it hundreds of times. Where had he left it? He couldn't remember. There was something wrong with his head. He couldn't remember _anything_.  
There must have been more mountains beyond the forest, he decided. This was just a valley, a large clearing he hadn't known about, or couldn't remember being here. He picked himself up again and started onward. He would find himself again, he _had_ to. Without his supplies, time was running out.  
The thought of dying here seriously crossed his mind as he wandered down into the valley. He couldn't help it. What a stupid, idiotic way to end his life. He'd only just begun to act on his true destiny. He had only just realised what he had been born to do. How could he allow himself to die before his quest had even started? He had vowed that the banal futility of the Freedom Fighters, puppies chasing their tails under the illusion of an eventual just cause that neither involved nor interested him, would not wind up being his life's legacy. If he died here, then it would be. He would never have the chance to prove that he had learned anything from his time with Sonic whatsoever. He would never have the chance to prove he even tried. All because he had been too stupid to even prepare without killing himself.  
When Tails reached the clearing, the sun was down and the valley was in darkness. There was a flicker of light ahead of him, near a copse of trees, that he realised was a campfire. Relief flooded over him. People! They would have a map, they would be able to tell him where he was. He ran, almost sprinted, toward the light.  
The small, crackling fire had something sitting over it - a cooking pot. Tails forgot all about being lost when he realised he was starving. He couldn't remember having eaten all day... or having done anything else, for that matter.  
He couldn't see any people around the camp, but his priorities had changed and he didn't really care. There was food lying around - a lot of food! Two significant piles of it. Shrink-packaged stuff, the kind that would last for a long time without refrigeration. Perfect for a long journey. He could eat now, and then ration the rest out for the journey ahead. He fell to his knees beside the bounty, mouth watering uncontrollably, and it didn't even dawn on him to consider that it all belonged to somebody else... until the shadow crept up behind him, and somebody spoke in an angry, growling voice.  
"I _told_ you I'd slice you in half if I caught you stealing from me. Now you're going to learn a thing or two about what it is to be an exile, you rat."  
Tails leaped to the side just in time to avoid being skewered on a knife blade. It sliced open a box of biscuits instead, and the contents spilled out into the grass.  
His attacker cursed loudly and knelt to salvage the biscuits. Tails backed away slowly, but ran into something warm and furry. He had backed into a large, feral looking mobian wolf, encrusted with mange and showing all of his teeth in a fierce, drooling growl.  
"He's come back for our loot, Dale," the first attacker said, and Tails could see his face. It was a fox, the same as him. "The kid's got some gall. Fresh from the hamster cage, I'll reckon. Doesn't quite know what he's dealing with."  
"I'll _teach_ him what he's dealing with," the wolf growled, and at the word 'teach' he spat so much foaming drool that Tails was near saturated with it. This guy was absolutely terrifying. It was rare for a mobian to share the beastly traits exhibited by the animals who shared their names, but enough time stranded in the wilderness, away from civilisation and forced to hunt and kill, forced to endure disease and famine, would often have this effect. When a mobian went feral, he or she was little more than an animal with a larger brain. The difference between a mobian (or _anthric_) species and an animal (or _zoic_) species could be blurred by extreme conditions. This guy looked like he could tear Tails limb from limb as easily as any zoic wolf, and more frightening, looked as though he wanted to.  
"I'm sorry," Tails stammered, "I didn't know- I'm- I'm hungry-"  
"You didn't _know_!" the other fox roared, "I _warned_ you _this morning_, you little maggot. This is _our haul_. It's law of the jungle out here, and I don't care if you're just a dumb kid, I'll slit you open just as fast as if you were one of the Armada."  
Tails couldn't understand anything that the fox was saying, and feared that the two of them were completely insane, which would make it much more difficult to escape from them. Crazy people couldn't be reasoned with.  
"You're m-mistaken," he stammered, "I've never met you before. I don't know what the Armada is. Please- please, just- I need to eat-"  
Both of the strangers laughed, for some reason.  
"Hey Dalziel," the wolf said, "He doesn't know who the Armada is."  
"You must take me for some kind of idiot," the fox said, "Is that what you think? That I'm a gibbering retard?"  
"No! I-"  
"You really want some of this? You want a warm jab in the guts, smart-aleck?" The fox, Dalziel, held up his knife, and Tails was shocked to see that he only had three fingers on his hand. There was no space where another one had been lopped off; the whole hand was shrivelled, emaciated, the fingers too long and clawlike. It looked much more like a bird's talon than a fox's hand.  
Tails just gulped, and he knew to his dismay that he was allowing the other two to see that he was terrified. They laughed again.  
"You find your own food," the fox said, "You'll learn, soon enough. You don't get fed out here like you do in there. You'll learn, or you'll die, either way it's none of ours. Poke through our stuff again, and Dale here will make a three course meal out of you. He's been out here longer than I have. He don't care, if it's animal or mobian, all tastes the same to him."  
Tails eyed the wolf, who eyed him back. He wondered whether 'Dale' was imagining how he would taste.  
"Now, scat," snapped Dalziel, and poked Tails with the end of the knife, hard enough to hurt but not to draw blood. It was all the persuasion he needed, and he ran from the two ferals, who shrieked near-insane laughter until he disappeared from their sight.  
Tails found a tree trunk in the darkness and hid behind it, panting and close to tears. He didn't have the energy for this. He was starving, he hurt all over, and he was exhausted. When he gathered the courage, he peered back.  
To his surprise, there was a campfire flickering nearby. He saw two mobians sitting by it. Perhaps they could offer him something to eat?

---

**12:35 pm**

A sound outside the mouth of the cave captured his attention.  
It could have been an animal, but Tails was almost sure it was mobian. Other hikers? Possibly. He briefly considered going out there and saying hello, when it dawned on him that he didn't realise why he was inside a cave in the first place. He couldn't exactly remember coming in.  
"I must be delirious," he muttered, "Too exhausted. I'm not even paying attention to what I'm doing."  
Something buzzed near his ear, like an enormous bug, and he let out a startled shriek and batted at the air. To his shock, there was something flying around in here with him. If it was a beetle, it was the biggest freaking beetle he'd ever seen. What was more, it didn't fly using wings, but with rotor blades, like a helicopter. If such a thing existed in nature, he'd never heard of it. The bug was huge and gold, and zipped around his head in a circle.  
The most shocking thing by far was when it spoke.  
"One last thing before I go!" it said, "Some helpful advice. The Armada don't really like exiles hanging around up here. They like you where they can keep tabs on you. I suggest you don't let them find you up here, or you might just be singled out as a troublemaker. From me to you, buckeroo, from me to you!"  
Tails just barked incoherently and swiped at the horrid thing. It avoided his blows while emitting beeping and clicking noises. Was this some kind of robot?  
"What are you?" he demanded, "What do you want?"  
"Hey, hey!" the thing cried out, "You're a crazy-guy! You're more busted than I am! I'm outta here! Good-_bye!_"  
It spun about on its rotors and flew out through the mouth of the cave and into the sky. Tails looked around the cave to make sure there weren't any more of the things about the place, but it seemed secure. Now he could focus on figuring out where he was.  
He left the cave to have a look about outside. The position of the sun and the heat told him that it was around noon, but he didn't recognise his surroundings. It was true that all the mountains looked very much the same, but why couldn't he remember what he had been doing this morning? Which direction he was headed?  
_I just need to look at the map_, he thought to himself, and looked about for his belongings. That was something else amiss. He wasn't so naive as to start out on this journey without packing supplies. He had a hiking bag with enough food to last him weeks, a tent, a map and other things. It was a huge bag, so where was it now? He began to panic a little. If he'd left it somewhere, set off without it and lost it, he was thoroughly screwed.  
Movement to his left. Tails turned and looked through the trees warily, in case it was a bear or something. He thought earlier that he'd heard a mobian out here, and he was right. But rather than approach the strangers, he kept himself hidden. These weren't hikers. These were military.  
The mystery of his missing bag was already fading from his memory as Tails watched three uniformed soldiers, all of them birds, move through the heavy foliage with a large degree of purpose. They were searching for something.  
A few things Tails thought were particularly odd about this. Firstly, he couldn't figure out to which nation these soldiers were allied. They weren't GUN, they most certainly weren't Arack, and no other people along the southern rim of Westerica had an organised state, at least not organised enough to have a military. Had he stumbled upon an invading force from some foreign nation looking to establish power on the region? If so, it made no sense that they would be here in the mountains, the border between Arack-occupied Kirandul and a hundred kilometres of Westerican desert. These people were a total anomoly. And Tails had no way of knowing if they were hostile or not. He decided to grab his backpack and move along.  
Looking around, he searched for it. But it wasn't there.  
_Why do I feel as though I've done this before?_  
A vague sense of de'ja'vu swept over him, as though partially remembering a dream. There were bizarre images, or fragments of images, in the back of his mind. A little yellow robot. A crested stranger with a fire in his eyes. The word _overdraw_ on the tip of his lips. He mouthed it in a whisper, but it revealed nothing.  
Already he had forgotten about the soldiers in persuit. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to clear his head. Joe's airport could not be far away. If he had lost his supplies, then he would have to reach his destination as soon as possible. He was already hungry. How long had it been since he had last eaten? He couldn't remember. He couldn't seem to remember much of anything about his immediate past. All he knew was that he had to press on. So he steeled himself for the long haul, and started onward.  
Tails had no compass apart from the sun, and with that as his guide, he hiked deep into the mountains in search of his destiny. It took him most of the day.

---

**12:15 pm**

A few metres into the cave, he tripped on something and forgot why he was running.  
_Easy does it, Tails. Slow and steady, now. Don't knock yourself out. Why am I in a cave?_  
He stopped to reassert himself, and sat down on the cold stone. He must have been thinking too hard and lost his sense of direction. There was no time for spelunking, he had to find Joe's airport and the Tornado. This wasn't a holiday. He didn't even really like caves.  
He picked up the thing that he had tripped on. It looked like a rock but it was too light and seemed to be made out of metal. Inspecting it, he found to his amusement that it was a little toy of some kind. It had a face and two legs, and looked somewhat like a little mechanical pig. The toy was encrusted with dirt, like it had been here a long time. He brushed it off and looked at its dulled gold face. The thing was a little like one of Robotnik's badniks, except that it was too small to be of any harm, and there was no reason for a badnik to be all the way out here. He smirked at it. Cute.  
Tails sat back and put his hand on the ground, and touched something else. A small scrap of metal that revealed itself to be a key, like something he might use to crank up an old fashioned clock. It was painted with the same dulled shade of gold as the little robot was. Curious, he looked for a hole in the thing, found one in its back, and inserted the key. It fit. What a strange little artifact. He tried to turn it, but the gears inside were clogged with dirt and made a strained crunching noise. He shook the robot and beat it against his hand to empty it out, but realised that the thing was probably too rusted to do much of anything. After a good shake, he turned the key again, and this time it cranked the spring inside, crunching only a little. He gave it a few good cranks and put it down on its feet.  
At first it looked like it was completely dead, but then the key began to turn on its own, very slowly, and the clockwork inside the robot began ticking over with a sick irregularity. The robot wobbled on its feet, and then one of its eyes flickered with light. Its jaw moved up and down, and its legs began to march on the spot. Such a queer contraption, a child wouldn't know what to make of it. The thing spun in a little circle, then shook erratically. It made a beeping sound, then a grinding sound, and chomped its jaws together. To Tails' shock, it spoke.  
"Remote Robot serial forty-seven-k reporting. Fatal error in unit seventy- seventy- seventy- seventy- sev-" The thing backfired suddenly, blowing a cloud of dirt out of its little mechanical backside, and fell on its face. The key stopped turning and it stopped dead.  
Tails nudged it with his foot, but it may as well have been a hunk of scrap. How unfathomably bizarre. It seemed that this was more than a toy, it was a fully-fledged robot of some kind. Tails had seen plenty of robots in his time, powered by plenty of different methods, but he had never seen a _clockwork_ robot, or ever even conceived of one. The whole idea was very amusing, and he found himself, in the face of his better judgement, cranking the key again. Much more, this time. The spring inside had plenty of give and he cranked for several minutes before it tightened up. It seemed the robot's insides had been cleaned out a little, for the gears churned more smoothly and with less noise.  
The robot's eyes flickered on again and this time it had a little look around, turning one way and then the other, its gears _tick-tick-ticking_ within its tiny chassis. It turned and looked right at Tails, eyes flashing twice. "Remote Robot serial forty-seven-k reporting," it said, "Idle time... one year, seven months? _Crikey!_ I have been out of it. Listen, buckaroo, thanks for the wind-up but where the heck am I?"  
"Uh, hello," Tails replied, "I, uh. Actually, I'm not sure. Somewhere in the Kirandul mountains, but beyond that-"  
"Oh _snap_, son, you're even more confused than I am," the robot buzzed. "Kirandul mountains indeed. I'm not _that_ busted. You really turn my crank."  
Tails was flabbergasted. The darned thing had an attitude.  
"Never mind," the robot said, "I remember, I remember. You try sleeping for a year and a half and you'll wonder where you are in the morning, too. Now if you'll excuse me..."  
The robot (and Tails was already starting to think of it as a 'he') seemed to go through a struggle with itself, shaking and beeping and making harsh grinding noises deep inside.  
"What's wrong?" Tails asked.  
"Nothing! Nothing! Nothing at all!"  
"Can I help?"  
"_No!_" The robot clambered away from him. "I will thank you to keep your nasty hands away from me. Truth be told, I shouldn't even be associating with you exiles, let alone letting you touch me."  
_Exiles?_  
"I'm very good with machines," Tails explained, "I repair aeroplanes as a hobby, so a simple little clockwork robot should be a piece of cake."  
"I am _not_ just a simple little clockwork robot!" it protested, "I am a very complex nucleo-silicon nanocomputer powered by a delicate internal kinetic engine. You could not possibly understand the intricacies of my advanced technology."  
"You're running on cogs and springs," Tails said, "Look. You have a cute little key and everything."  
The robot appeared embarrassed about its little key and turned around to hide it. "I don't have to listen to these wild allegations! I'm not letting you- get- anywhere-- near--"  
Its voice began to wind down like a cassette tape losing power, and the two little eyes faded into darkness. The robot's key cranked to a stop and it fell dead where it stood. Tails snickered and picked it up like a broken toy.  
There was a clasping mechanism on the contraption's rear end, and Tails was able to open it up and see inside. What he found were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny cogs and springs. This machine was very complicated indeed, but it was basically clockwork. He couldn't fathom how such primitive mechanics were able to power a computer. The machine had been right to that extent. Tails shook as much dirt as he could out of the intricate system and blew hard into it a few times. He then closed it all back up again and wound the key.  
"-me," the robot concluded, and nodded. "Now, away I go."  
To Tails' awe, a tiny little set of rotor blades poked up out of the robot's midsection, and its feet retracted into its body. The blades spun and the robot lifted off the ground. This just kept getting weirder and weirder.  
A sound outside the mouth of the cave captured his attention.

---

**11:50 am**

Tails scrambled for purchase on an outcrop, struggling to drag himself into a small cave in the cliff wall. When he pulled his body to safety, he lay on his back on the rocks, panting and flexing his sore muscles. As he rested, it dawned on him that he didn't seem to recall what, exactly, he had been doing.  
He felt as though he had run a marathon through rough countryside. He was scratched and bruised all over, his muscles were tired and overexerted. It dawned on him that his young teenage brain, infected with illusions of immortality, had vastly underestimated the difficulty of passing through the Kirandul mountan range on his own. He remembered the first time he came here, with Sonic, many years ago. He had been young and rowdy, had harboured a severe distrust for the hedgehog, and had given him a hard time throughout the entire ordeal. Now he wished that Sonic was here with him, to guide and help him, as he always had in the past.  
(But he's not here, you dumb kid. He's gone, he's gone for good, and if you ever want to be even half the mobian he was, you'll get up and fight on.)  
There was still a part of him that couldn't accept Sonic's demise, and it certainly wasn't logic that led him to this belief. The logic was against the idea. His uncle Tyler, or rather the monster Nightmare who lived within him, had ended Sonic just as he had ended Trevor Prower. The only true father figures who he had ever known, and the same beast had taken them both. Despite this, Tails did not harbour resentment toward his uncle Tyler. It was Nightmare who he blamed, and whoever it had been who had created the beast. Tyler thought the creature inside him was a god. Tails, however, had other theories.  
The evidence supporting Sonic's death was overwhelming. Why, then, did a nagging part of him insist that the hedgehog was still alive? Tails was not one for blind faith. Faith had never put food on his table or cash in his pocket. Faith didn't keep him alive, knowledge did. And Sonic was not an immortal, he was young, reckless, and as impermanant as any other life. There was no evidence that he was alive, and Tails struggled to suppress the thought that he was. Not because he didn't want Sonic to be alive, but because blind faith was never far from blind hope. And while blind faith could at times be admirable, blind hope was almost always pathetic.  
(So get up, Tails. His legacy is your burden, now. Both of their legacies - Sonic's and your father's - are survived only by you.)  
Tails had three selves who coinhabited his mind, three tiny entities who often bickered for control, moreso during difficult times. One was born in the streets and knew only survival, at any cost whatsoever. Another was born in Knothole, and knew about honour, responsibility and respect. Tails had spent much of his life trying to supress one or the other, but now he found that he fared best with a healthy combination of both. The first told him how to live, and the second told him why. But there was a third entity, and it had never been born, as far as Tails could tell he had always possessed it. It was the third voice that whispered to him about faith, belief against the odds, and he frequently ignored it because it never helped him do anything at all. Wishing that Sonic was alive would never make it so, and would only hinder him from accepting it.  
It brought to mind one of Nails the Bat's sayings. Whenever Tails had wished for something aloud, Nails would tell him to hold out his hands. When Tails did so, Nails would always snort laughter.  
"Now, wish in one hand, and crap in the other. Go ahead and see which one fills up first."  
It made sense. The only reality was the one that he could see with his own eyes, and if he added one and one together, no matter how much he hated it, he would always be left with two. Every darn time.  
Tails picked himself up against the complaints of his aching muscles, and dusted the chalky white dirt out of his fur. All this deep thinking and he seemed to have forgotten what he had been doing before he lay down to rest. Which direction was he headed? Which had he come from? He reached for his pack and only clawed at dirt. Frowning, he looked about for it, and was hit with a sinking feeling when he realised it wasn't in sight.  
_My supplies! My rations!_  
A sound to the right of him caught his attention. It was like someone had thrown a pebble very hard at the rock face near his head, and small stones rained down on him. It had been preceeded with a resonating _crack_ from below.  
Tails hit the deck before the sound had even finished echoing. He knew the sound of a gunshot as well as he knew the sound of birdsong.  
Lying as close to the ground as he could, he panted and waited. Somebody opened up with an automatic weapon, peppering the rocks above him with bulletholes, but his assailant had no clear shot.  
_Who in holy heck is shooting at me? Up here?_  
Perhaps there were pirates, or drug runners in these mountains. Tails hadn't heard of it, Joe had never mentioned anything of the sort and he _lived_ here. So what was going on?  
Somebody down below was yelling _cease fire!_ with a voice of authority, and the shooting stopped. That was even more bizarre. Pirates don't say 'cease fire'.  
Tails wanted very much to poke his head out, just for a moment, to see who was down there. But he was smarter than that. Anyone who used the term 'cease fire' was probably a very good shot. He kept all of his vital parts out of the range of their bullets, but he didn't know how long he would be safe here. If they wanted him dead then they'd come for him.  
"_You up there!_" The voice from below shouted up at him. "_You are safe to come down! I have instructed my troops that you are not to be harmed! I just want to talk to you, yes?_"  
Tails snorted. _Won't be harmed. Yeah, right._ The only talking this guy wanted to do was behind the barrel of a very large gun, and it was a discussion Tails decided he could live without. He looked around for a means of escape, and saw a large cave behind him. Caves were risky because often there was no way out of them but the way you went in. But it seemed like there was no other way, at least not without putting himself in the crosshair. He took the option and ran with it.  
A few metres into the cave, he tripped on something and forgot why he was running.

---

**11:30 am**

A clicking sound near his ear forced Tails to turn away from the gruesome image. He came face to face with two complete strangers.  
"Huh?"  
Two black, dark uniformed birds were kneeling in front of him. One was wearing a helmet that obscured most of his (or her) face, and the other, a stony-faced bird with a spiky crest of black feathers, was clicking his fingers next to Tails' ear.  
"Hello?" he was saying, "Hello? Hello? Who are you?"  
"Hunnh?"  
Tails shook his head, frowned, looked around in confusion. Where was he? He felt as though he had just woken up from a nap, but he was standing beside a road somewhere. A bunch of dark-coloured trucks were driving along it. Who were these strangers standing before him? They were actually rather terrifying. The one with the crest had a cruel edge to his expression and a somewhat frightening glint in his eye. Tails, blinking and swaying in disorientation, looked down and saw that the bird was wearing his name on his uniform.  
_**Lt. OVERDRAW**_. Were these guys military?  
"What's going on?" he asked.  
"Identify yourself _immediately_," commanded Overdraw, and his voice was gathering a distinct air of irritation about it. Tails could tell that this guy had a very short temper. "Are you lost? Did you get out of quarantine, yes? Do you have a signature?"  
Tails didn't have a clue what he was talking about. All he picked up was that Overdraw had a very queer accent that he couldn't place, and that was a little disconcerting. If these guys were military, he didn't recognise the uniforms.  
Man, why couldn't he remember where he was?  
"I- I don't-" he stammered, pinching the bridge of his snout between two fingers.  
The two birds looked at each other with hard expressions, then turned back to Tails.  
"I think that you should come with me, yes?"  
They began to advance on him. Tails backed away, extremely fearful of the glint in that crested stranger's eyes.  
Several dark vehicles had stopped nearby and more birds were stepping out and walking toward him. Was he infringing on somebody's territory? He was drawing blanks in his mind, unable to even guess at his whereabouts. He assumed that he must have fallen asleep in the mountains somewhere, but if so, why couldn't he remember why he was standing here?  
In such bizarre and surreal circumstances, the only possibility that he could come up with was that the crested Lieutenant had something to do with his alarming state of mind. His memory had been robbed from him by this stranger, and he was darned if he was going to go along with him. While Overdraw reached behind his back for something he had holstered and reached for Tails with the other hand, the fox followed his instincts to turn and run away.  
This didn't seem to impress Overdraw. In fact, it made him hopping mad. The Lieutenant and half of his army bolted after him, and after a moment he began to hear gunshots.  
Tails was absolutely terrified, but it failed to register with him that he had absolutely no idea why. Somebody was after him, this he knew, and he couldn't let them catch him, this he knew as well. He recognised the sound of gunfire, even if he didn't know who was shooting at him, and this was enough to keep his instincts geared toward escape. Nothing else, for the time being, mattered.  
He ran for what seemed like a long time, but panic made the perception of time difficult. Tails was running through bush, then a field, then across rocks. Ahead he saw a cliff face, and knew that it was a dead end. For a moment he glanced back to see what or who was chasing him, and saw three black all-terrain vehicles advancing on him from behind. Each one had a huge gun mounted on top, and each had a mobian in military uniform leaning out the window with another gun. That was a lot of guns, a few too many for Tails' comfort, and they were all aiming at him. They were going to pick him off like a clay pigeon. He looked back toward the cliff face that he was approaching, saw the caves higher in the rock structure, and made a rash instinctual decision. He ran atop a large rocky outcrop, leaped as hard as he could at its peak, and spun his tails like rotor blades. The thrust launched him high, high into the air, and for a moment he thought that it may have been the highest he had ever flown on his own. His mind drifted, he forgot his danger and thought only of the euphoria of free flight. Oh how he'd missed it! There was no gravity. There was no Mobius. There was only air, wind, the sky, and Tails. He closed his eyes and spread his arms wide. He was the sky. This was bliss.  
He opened his eyes just in time to see that he was about to crash into the cliff face, and bracing himself for impact, he managed to grab onto a rock and steady himself.  
Tails scrambled for purchase on an outcrop, struggling to drag himself into a small cave in the cliff wall. When he pulled his body to safety, he lay on his back on the rocks, panting and flexing his sore muscles. As he rested, it dawned on him that he didn't seem to recall what, exactly, he had been doing.

---

**11:20 am**

An unfamiliar sound behind him made him turn around, and all at once he lost his train of thought.  
He turned back again. He was in a field... had he been talking to somebody? There was nobody there now, though there was a hole in the ground that looked like something had been half-buried there until very recently.  
He turned to look behind him. What was that sound? It was like heavy traffic on a highway. The only problem was that there were no highways through the Kirandul Ranges. Was that where he was? It certainly didn't look much like the mountains, but then, he didn't know where else he could possibly be. The mountains were his most recent memory.  
This was very strange.  
Running through a patch of scrub, he followed the sound of traffic. When he burst through the wilderness to the other side, he began to panic. He didn't know where he was. _He didn't recognise any of this._  
There was a road, and there were dark-coloured vehicles driving along it, dozens of them, all in the same direction, all identical. Tails shielded his eyes from the bright sunlight and looked up and down the road.  
Why was he in such pain? His muscles ached, and he felt scratched and bruised all over, like he'd been doing heavy construction work in a hailstorm. He looked down at his body and saw that his fur was caked with mud and sand. He was a wreck. He looked and felt like he'd been lost in the wilderness for days. At this point, he couldn't be sure he hadn't been.  
"Hey," he said. He'd meant it as a shout, but his voice was weak. He had to get some help. Someone had to _help_ him.  
"_Hey!_" He began to jog, then run, along the side of the road in the direction the trucks were going. "_Hey! Help me! Somebody help me! Someone help!_"  
He didn't want to cry, he wanted to be stronger than that, but the more he realised how much time was missing from his mind, the more of a panic he drifted into. His heart thudded, his stomach churned. Something terrible had happened, and he didn't know what it was. He didn't know _where_ he was.  
After running for some time, one of the vehicles, smaller than most of the others, slowed down and pulled over into the embankment ahead of him. Both doors opened, and two people got out. Strangely, they were both birds of some kind, and they both wore similar dark uniforms. The driver of the vehicle was wearing a helmet that obscured his eyes. The passenger's uniform was much more decorated, and his head was plumed with a tall crest of jet black feathers. Both of them approached him with expressions of faint concern. They appeared to be military of some kind, which Tails found both alarming and comforting. Alarming because this much military almost always meant very deep trouble was brewing, but comforting because he knew they would help him. That was part of a military's job... unless they were the enemy.  
"Please help me," he begged.  
The birds stopped about a meter ahead of him, and the tall one who appeared to be a superior officer kneeled to Tails' height. Tails noticed a patch on his uniform that read _**Lt. OVERDRAW**_.  
"You are an exile, yes?" he asked.  
The bird spoke with an accent that Tails didn't recognise at all. That worried him even more, and his lip trembled when he replied.  
"Help me, I don't know- I don't know where I am-"  
The kneeling bird looked up at the standing one, then back at Tails.  
"You are an exile, yes?" Overdraw asked again, "What is your name? Who are you?"  
Tails didn't know what he meant by _exile_, but he supposed that, in a way, he was one. He had been exiled from the world that was familiar to him, thrust into madness, a refugee from sanity.  
"My name is Tails," he said, "I think- I think I've lost my memory. Just parts of it, I-"  
He happened to glance toward the road, where the dark vehicles were still passing, and saw a much larger truck moving slowly behind the convoy. The truck was carrying something on a huge open trailer, tied down with ropes and harnesses. To his shock, he recognised the cargo. _It was his plane! The Tornado!_ It was extremely damaged, as though it had crashed. The cockpit was all smashed in and scorched, and a wing was missing. _His poor, poor Tornado!_  
A clicking sound near his ear forced Tails to turn away from the gruesome image. He came face to face with two complete strangers.

---

**11:12 am**

Tails picked himself up with a frustrated grunt, blinked and wiped the mud out of his eyes. Now... What the heck was he doing?  
He was in some kind of scrub, sitting in a puddle of sandy, slimy mud. He'd been running and had fallen over. Okay, why? He looked around in idle confusion. _This_ wasn't the Kirandul mountains... was it?  
To find himself in a situation where he had absolutely no clue where he was or what he'd been doing was very strange and somewhat frightening for Tails, as though God Himself had picked him up from whatever he'd been doing, shaken him around a bit, and dumped him in some random location on Mobius. What had been his last memory? He focused to find the answer... he was looking for the airport. Of course... he was going to see Flightless Joe.  
This wasn't an airport, and it wasn't the mountains. It didn't even seem to be the right climate, although that was quite ridiculous. He was in pain, he ached quite badly from head to toe, but it wasn't from the fall he had just taken. It was much worse than that, as though he'd been in a boxing match with three grown bodybuilders.  
Holy crap. What had he been _doing_?  
He laughed and shook his head. A brain glitch, that was all it was, a temporary case of mild insanity. Any moment now he would remember what he had been doing and get back to it. The first step to that end was probably figuring out where he was. Because it sure wasn't the mountains.  
Tails stood up and looked around for anything that seemed familiar. He listened to the sounds on the breeze and thought he heard ocean waves and gulls. Was he near a beach? That would certainly be strange. There was also the sound of two people arguing, about what he had no idea, but it seemed quite heated.  
He decided to investigate. It probably couldn't hurt. At least he would be able to ask someone what was going on.  
There was a clearing in the scrub, and the source of the commotion was a wolf and another fox. Tails could see immediately that neither were in very good shape. They were filthy, unkempt creatures, too thin by far, and the wolf had traces of mange on his pelt. They were arguing bitterly and standing over something that was half-buried in the dirt.  
Tails recognised it instantly. It was the supply canister from the Tornado. On long flights, it was stocked up with food and other necessities. It was also very much attached to the plane, which meant that someone had ripped it out. These two derelicts were probably responsible.  
"Hey!" he shouted, "Hey, you!"  
The feuding mobians fell silent and turned to look at him, and Tails could now see that they were actually quite intimidating characters, especially the wolf, and he was sorry he approached them. His nerve was a little weakened, but now he had to continue.  
"That's mine," he said, "Where did you get that?"  
The wolf and the fox looked at one another for a moment, then back down at him.  
"_Excuse_ me?" the fox asked.  
"That's mine," Tails replied, and began to approach the canister, reaching for it. "It's-"  
"_Get back!_" the fox shrieked. The wolf was snarling, ropes of saliva dripping from his bared teeth. Tails gasped and backed away. Approaching these two had obviously been a very bad idea.  
"It's okay," he said softly, "Everything's all right."  
"Who are you?" the fox demanded, "You seen him before, Dale?"  
"Never seen 'im," the wolf replied.  
"My name's Tails, I just-"  
"You an exile? Are you an exile or are you a hamster?" The fox spat in the grass.  
_A hamster?_ "I don't understand," Tails said.  
"You don't understand? Well understand _this_, shortstop. It's finders keepers out here. You want to eat, you get your own chow. This one's ours, and we ain't sharing. Try to steal from us and we'll cut you up bad, okay? _Real_ bad."  
"No problem. Listen, no problem, okay?"  
"No problem. Come on, Dale."  
The wolf and the fox picked up the canister and carried it away, looking back constantly at Tails to make sure he wasn't following. He didn't dare.  
An unfamiliar sound behind him made him turn around, and all at once he lost his train of thought.

---

**10:43 am**

We can predict the future of our lives; the nature of our doom eludes us all.  
He awoke because breathing was difficult. He was breathing sand. When he lifted his head, the coughing reflex kicked in immediately, and his diaphragm spasmed uncontrollably, emptying his lungs and breathing apparatus of the foreign matter that choked it. After that was done, he gasped deeply and rolled onto his back, breathing as though breathing was coming back into fashion.  
His entire body hurt very badly. He was bruised and sprained from head to toe. When he ran a hand across his face, he found that his forehead was bleeding. At least he didn't think any bones had been broken. He didn't _think_.  
The sun overhead bore down on him and he shielded his eyes from it while he rested his wounded body in the soft sand. Soon he would begin to focus on the problem of his not knowing where he was or how he had gotten into this state, but for now he only wanted to rest and think.  
He could hear the sound of waves crashing against the beach, and that was strange to him, because the last memories he could piece together were of the mountains. The Kirandul mountains, inland to the east of the Great Forest. Why had he been there? Think, Tails, think.  
He tried to stand, but it was more difficult than he expected. Something seemed wrong with his sense of balance, almost like he had been drugged somehow, and it took him three attempts to get on his feet and stay there. His head ached very badly, and he saw spots before his eyes.  
Darn it... where the heck _was_ he?  
There were tropical palm trees all around him, vegetation that in no way fit the south Westerican climate. He was on a large beach, he could smell the salt and hear the water and the gulls, but he had no memory of beaches. He could remember wanting to go somewhere.  
Tails tendered his sore head and stumbled through the dunes like a drunkard. He fell over once, and struggled to his feet again. Whatever had happened to him, it had beat him up pretty bad, and the most severe injury seemed to be the knock on his head. He wondered if that was what was wrong with his balance... and his memory.  
But he remembered who he was. He was even starting to remember what he had come to think of as his quest. It had been his father's quest first, he had merely taken up the reins as his father's son. Trevor Prower had once made a promise, one that he hadn't been able to keep. Keeping that promise was the quest that Tails had undertaken, in his father's honour. That quest was to set his people free.  
Tails climbed atop a tall dune and looked around, trying to see anything that he might find familiar and jog his lost memory. The beach was very clean, even pristine, almost untouched by mobian hands. A natural paradise. He sat and looked out at the ocean for a little while. Strangely, there seemed to be a bad storm brewing on the horizon. The weather on the beach was perfect, but not too far out he could see a restless black sky, boiling with angry cloud. Lightning flashed every few seconds. He was glad that he wouldn't have to fly or sail through _that_.  
Tails looked up and down the beach, searching for any sign of life. He couldn't see too far in either direction because of the tropical wilderness, but surely he wasn't far south of the mountains.  
A memory fragment flashed into his mind, and he focused on it to try and establish a context, but it was like grabbing at a wet bar of soap. He saw Flightless Joe, his friend the eccentric pilot who lived deep in the Kirandul Range in his private mountaintop airport. The memory was confusing because he had wanted to see Joe, had been travelling through the mountains for that very purpose.  
Had he already met with Joe, and now couldn't remember doing so? How did that lead him _here?_  
The first thing he knew he would have to do was find his way back to the mountains. Joe would surely be able to shed some light on this mystery, and even if he couldn't, he could certainly help with his quest - he needed to find an island, and for that, he needed a plane.  
He began walking, along the shoreline, because he was afraid he might get lost if he wandered inland and found himself in some unmapped wilderness. Wherever he was, it would come to him soon. He was just a little out of it at the moment, a little confused and disoriented. All he would have to do was find some familiar surroundings and everything would be all right again.  
A beach. This was so weird. No part of his plans involved travelling to a beach. When he and Tyler had parted ways, his route was inland. He had been in the mountains. The _mountains_. At what point had he arrived on a beach?  
Now he was walking along the coastline but he couldn't even really remember getting here, and that was frightening. He had woken up in the sand... hadn't he? The details seemed to be fading out of his head. All he could tell was that he was on a beach, now. There were footprints behind him. Where was he walking to? Why?  
_Focus, Tails. You have to find Flightless Joe, you have to get to the mountains, get off this beach. You have a job to do, your father died for this, and now you must... you must... good God, where the heck am I?_  
He looked around, almost insane with confusion. Beach. Waves. Footprints behind him. He didn't know where he was walking or why, but perhaps if he continued he would find out. Why was he in pain? Why was he on a beach? Shouldn't he be in the mountains? Darn it, he was supposed to be in the _mountains_.  
His memory of having awakened in the sand now eluded him. As far as he knew, his walk along this beach (and the pain he was experiencing) was completely without context, and that was a very queer sensation indeed.  
Tails made his way through a patch of wilderness, and then scaled a dune, all the while searching for some rhyme or reason, some key to his immediate past. When he reached the top and looked over, he froze in his tracks. There were people up ahead, and something was buried in the sand.  
He crouched behind a rock and squinted to make out the details, hoping that this would clear everything up.  
Instead, it only made things more confusing.  
The machine that he saw half-buried in the beach was familiar to him. He could have sworn that it was his plane, the Tornado. But the Tornado should have been with Flightless Joe at his mountain airport. What it was doing here (wherever _here_ was) was a total mystery. It appeared to have crashed. One wing was further down the beach from the rest of the wreckage, which was itself half buried nose-first in the sand. It pained Tails very much to see his beloved plane in such a condition. It had been so long since he had seen it, and this was the state it was in. One thing was for sure, it wouldn't be flying him to any island any time soon.  
There were about a dozen people around the crashed Tornado, none of whom Tails recognised. They all wore strange, identical uniforms, and he didn't recognise these either. They looked quasi-military, but they weren't GUN or anything of the sort. Their uniforms were dark khaki, and they wore bulky jackets and large helmets. What was more, they all seemed to be bird mobians, every last one of them, which was strange in such a multiracial world as modern day Mobius. Perhaps it had some significance.  
It dawned on Tails that he really had no idea why he was sitting on a sand dune watching a bunch of birds in army uniforms inspect his Tornado. What was more, why had it crashed? His poor plane! He seemed to be in a lot of pain, too. Had he been in a crash? A brief moment of panic flooded over him as he realised he had no memory of arriving here.  
Why was he... on a _beach?_  
Shouldn't he be in the _mountains?_  
Why had his plane crashed? Why couldn't he remember it? And who were those freaky looking birds?  
He looked up and saw that two of the birds were walking in his direction. It dawned on him that he really didn't want them to see him. Whatever mystery lay in his immediate situation, he would work it out without any help from _them_.  
Tails backed away, sliding down the side of the dune, and then started running inland, toward the thick scrub that lined the far side of the beach. This wasn't the kind of complication he needed, not when he had a quest to undertake.  
He ran through the thick scrub for several metres before he tripped on something and went sprawling face-first into the wet, sandy mud.  
For Tails Prower, his adventure began here. His words to Uncle Tyler still sat firm in his mind. "I swear, whatever it takes, I will find our people and set them free. Or I will die trying, as my father did. I'll do it, Ty, I'll take an oath. I'll free them, or die trying."  
Surely, his future carried one of these fates on the wind. It just might not have been the fate that he preferred.  
Tails picked himself up with a frustrated grunt, blinked and wiped the mud out of his eyes. Now... What the heck was he doing?

---

**10:00 am**

This was not the way it was supposed to end; but this was how it began.  
The patch of ocean that connected the Sea of Torion to far off western lands was known as the Forbidden Zone for a reason. Two storm belts converged in this region, giving birth to hurricanes that raged with terrifying fervor. Planes and ships had an unfortunate history of going missing here. Flying or sailing through the Forbidden Zone was a task reserved for the suicidal, the deranged and the stupid. Tails may have been neither, but then he had no choice. This was his destiny. If he died, then it would be in accordance with that destiny.  
Though he hoped and prayed that he wouldn't.  
The sky was rarely visible through these thick, nerve-consuming stormclouds. Somewhere over the horizon a buzzing sound could be heard over the boiling thunder, and a dark spot moved against the water like a low flying bird. The lights on the wings discounted any further avian similarity. This was a mobian-made bird, a machine created to give the flightless a chance at flight; a corruption of nature on one level, perhaps, or a defiance of God, but the argument could also be made that it was an example of mobiankind simply winning the game. As though God had created bird, then created mobian and said to him "_There. Now, do better. Make me proud._"  
Tails Prower was certainly an example of one of nature's blurred lines, more a bird in spirit than a fox, in the air more often than on the ground. For Tails, the air smelled sweeter above the trees and the buildings, above the heads of the quarreling, warring mobians down below him. Heaven really was a place above the clouds. After being grounded for so long in the embattled territory of the Great Forest of Westerica, Tails took to the sky again as a beached whale took to the ocean. Seated in the cockpit of his little plane, he thought he might never leave it again. He was truly at home. This was where he belonged, not in the war-embroiled cities and villages of the mainland, but in the azure skies above it all.  
For Tails, the adventure was still ahead. He wished this flight, the best that he had ever had, would never end. The wind rushing through his hair, tickling his fur, filling his spirit with glee. But it did have to end. There was adventure in his future, destiny awaited him. New friends were to be made, and lost. Enemies lay ahead; love, tyranny, violence, hope... and a sterile room, a white table, a sharpened scalpel.  
Of course, he knew none of this. Not yet.  
The weather was rough. Tails had expected this, and was prepared, but there was only so much that his little plane could take. The heavy winds pummeled the Tornado 2, tried to rip Tails from the sky and cast him into the sea for his insolence - the sky was for birds and storms, not for mutant foxes and their blasphemous flying contraptions. Tails struggled to keep his wings steady, stayed low to the water while being wary of large waves. Lightning flashes were becoming more frequent around him, and there was always the danger that one might strike him. The sky was growing darker and darker. The wind was increasing in ferocity. A seed of panic settled in his gut when he realised he was going to need to land soon, and there wasn't anywhere to go. There was supposed to be an island here. At the very least, he had expected it to be here.  
Cautiously, he fixed the Tornado on autopilot and unfolded his map. He couldn't hold it - the wind crunched it into a ball around his hands, blew it back into his face, and he couldn't make out anything. He had memorised the co-ordinates, anyway. He checked his instruments, which were playing up in the fierce weather, but they seemed to indicate that he was in the right place. Annoyed, he looked around below him. Nothing but angry ocean, as far as he could see. This was quickly becoming a crisis situation. Ear-shattering thunder cracked overhead, and for a fraction of a moment he thought it was the sound of his plane crashing. The wind tore the map out of his hands and blew it away.  
Time to call for help. He preferred to fly in secret, but he was not a foolish pilot.  
"Mayday," he said firmly over the radio, "Mayday. Mayday. This is the aircraft Tornado, requesting emergency landing. Can anyone read me? Weather conditions are perilous. This is a licenced Westerican aircraft requesting immediate assistance, do you read? My call name is Tornado, registration code 667-84Q. Is anyone out there? This is an emergency mayday broadcast, over."  
The radio hissed with empty static. Tails closed his eyes and prayed. No response was forthcoming. He tried again.  
"Mayday, mayday. This is the licenced aircraft the Tornado requesting immediate emergency assistance, is anyone out there?" He repeated his identity and his request, and hoped beyond hope. Only static replied, and his spirit faded. Perhaps something had happened to his homeland in the time he had been away. Perhaps Tyler didn't even know that all that was out here was churning water and raging storms.  
Tails drew breath to make a third report, when his radio crackled to life. The voice was shrouded in feedback and static, and he could only make out every other word.  
"We...Armada...we are...our airspace...you must...immediately...permission...is not...we do not...guests...presence...not requested...are the...Armada we..."  
Tails tried frustratedly to make sense of the broadcast. "This is the Tornado... can you repeat the previous statement?"  
Static. No discernable response.  
"This is the Tornado, I am requesting-"  
"_We are the Armada,_" the radio cut in quite clearly, "The Armada we are. You...our airspace...you must...(long static)...do not...receive guests...not...requested...(long static)...turn...immediately...we are...the Armada...we are..."  
They seemed to be telling him to turn back. Right now, that didn't look like it was going to be an option.  
"I can not turn back, Armada! This is a mayday, this is an emergency, I am going to crash and burn if I do not find somewhere to land right now! Flying conditions are impossible, I'm going to break apart! Over!"  
There was no response but static. Rain began to pummel him in the face, it felt like the clouds were shooting needles at him, and suddenly he couldn't see. He tried to shield his eyes to keep watch on his instruments, but they seemed to be going haywire, and were probably about as useful to him now as the map had been. He was flying blind.  
Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed directly ahead, and the sound itself seemed powerful enough to thrash his plane to bits. He tried to turn, but the Tornado wasn't listening to him anymore. The rain and wind pounded his face, the plane jerked back and forth, like a scrap of paper caught in a gale. He was at the mercy of the storm, and the storm was not merciful. He was going down... oh mercy, he was going down.  
Of course, Tails did not meet his end here. Destiny lay ahead of him, after all, and fate would not take his life in this storm.  
It would, perhaps in bad-tempered compromise, take his memory. A fierce updraft battered the cockpit from below, and his forehead connected hard with the dashboard. Everything went black here.  
Tails' future lay ahead of him, but he knew none of it. The future as a concept exists only in our minds, for although we may glimpse it, our glimpse is only conjecture, the product of probabilities, statistics, combinations of variables, all mixed in with hope, prayer, and wishes. What we see in our minds is nought but a simplified vision, a generalised projection of one possible, ideal path. Our true future is unknown, and our mortality is the deepest mystery of all. We can predict the future of our lives; the nature of our doom eludes us all.

To be continued.


	2. Introspect

TAILS OF BRAVE ADVENTURE  
S Peter Davis

All characters (C) SEGA, Archie and SP Davis 2006.  
Used without permission

---

This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
He was on a gurney, but he couldn't see who was pushing him. His head was a drugged-down lump of lead on a rubber neck, he couldn't move an inch. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling marched past his vision as he floated along the hallway in a white bed. The people around him had no faces. No... they were wearing masks. Blank, white masks. Dozens of eyes stared down at him and he tried to speak but he couldn't. He wasn't even sure he was making a sound, because his ears didn't work. The world was a reel of film without a soundtrack.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
To understand how he had arrived in this situation was a futile effort. He couldn't remember. His past was a blur to him as a dream becomes vague and incorporeal upon waking. The mountains... ah, but even they were slipping away into that dark abyss, now. Besides, what relevance did the past hold when his present was what it was? His quest was surely lost. He had failed his family and himself. His failure was utter and total. It didn't matter what became of him, now.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
Now he was in a room... a white, sterile room without windows. He watched the masked people above him as they handed various silvery instruments back and forth to one another. They were all wearing rubber gloves and blue plastic coats. He was completely paralysed, unable to do anything but watch, but nevertheless he could feel his flesh creep underneath his skin as he was lifted onto a white table, a soft pillow slipped under his head. A bright light was switched on above him.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end.  
One of the faceless strangers stood over him and held up something that glinted in the light. He knew his father had died in vain. There was no justifying his life, which had been so fleeting and pointless that he couldn't even remember it by the end. He tried to say this; he tried to announce that it didn't matter what they did with him now that his purpose had been terminated, because without his destiny he was just a sack of rotting meat in a freak's shell. But he couldn't speak. The drugs had numbed him. He could only lie in wait.  
Tails was awake and watching when the scalpel came down.  
This was not the way it was supposed to end; but this was how it began.

---

**INTROSPECT**

---

**10:00 am**

Somebody was mopping the sweat from his brow with a soft rag and speaking to him in whispers. For a few minutes, Tails Prower was five years old. His father stood by his bed and ran a gentle hand through his forelocks, breathing softly so as not to disturb him as he dozed. It was warm in his presence, and Tails knew that as long as he was near, nothing bad was going to happen. He scared away all of the monsters. Tails smiled and wrapped himself more tightly in the soft blanket.  
But Tails was not five. He was fifteen. His father was dead. Nothing could ever change this. Time does not heal all wounds, and the best we can do is learn to live with them.  
He opened his eyes and it was not his father who stood above him, smiling down at him with paternal devotion. The sky stretched from one horizon to the other through a great glass ceiling, and although the sun beat down on him, he felt cool and relaxed. Some manner of technology had neutralised its warmth; filed down nature's sharp teeth.  
"There you go," the figure above him said, "How do you feel?"  
Tails blinked and stared as his vision sharpened. Standing over him was a stranger, a tall avian male wearing an elaborately decorated cloak dyed with every colour of the rainbow. The only part of him that was visible beneath his flowing clothing was his head, donned with a spectacular crest of plumage dyed at the tips. He lowered his long, pointed beak and smiled warmly at Tails as he laced his hands and took a step back from the bed. His eyes were a haunting, brilliant shade of blue.  
"I feel... fine..." Tails muttered, and sat up to take a look around. The huge room around him seemed to form the tip of a great glass obelisk. All he could see was sky amidst the sterile white of the sculpted architecture around him. He was in the middle of a tropical garden. Palm trees and ferns grew freely amidst intricately pruned hedges and succulants. He could hear a fountain somewhere. The air was a little humid. Tails noticed that the bed on which he'd been sleeping didn't belong here; he'd been carried here just so that it could be the first thing he saw upon waking. It was breathtaking.  
"I'm so glad to hear it," the bird said. He was soft-spoken, and radiated an atmosphere of pleasantness that put Tails at ease almost immediately. His accent was unique and exotic, subtle and elegant, a manner of speaking Tails had never heard before. "You'd been hurt quite badly, out there. Taken quite a few blows to the head, we feared that you might have acquired some lasting damage. But our doctors, they are the best."  
"I don't... remember much." Tails said.  
"You had some trouble with your memory, yes. We treated it, as well as your concussion. You've been asleep for twenty-five hours, you know."  
"Twenty-five hours," Tails repeated, and yawned. "Excuse me, but... where am I?"  
"Oh, how rude of me!" The colourful stranger laughed. "I beg your pardon. I am Badoru Kukku. And _this_ is my paradise."  
He pronounced his name with precision and pride, placing emphasis and elongation upon the second syllable. Kuk_kuu_. It was nearly enough to make Tails ashamed of his own pedestrian and comparitively almost ugly name.  
Suddenly he remembered something. "Hey wait... I was in... I was in an _operating theatre!_" He remembered the horror of the scalpel that glinted in the sterile white light, saw it again as it fell toward his abdomen. He ripped the sheets off the bed and inspected his body, clutching at handfuls of fur.  
"Oh, don't worry," Kukku replied with a humoured grin, "There wasn't an operation. We just patched you up a little, dressed your wounds, tended to your bruises."  
"But I remember the scalpel, they _cut_ me!"  
"Just a nick. Just to extract a tiny sample of tissue. We took a bit of blood, too, just a thimble full. You were barely scratched, I made sure of that myself. You're a very special boy, you mean so much to me. So much to all of us. A little miracle."  
"I don't understand."  
"Oh, I will explain later. For now, there is something I want you to see. Come over here, with me."  
Tails slipped out of bed and followed Kukku to the glass wall, where they stood side by side and gazed out over the landscape. The room was much higher up than Tails even imagined. The ground was very far away, it looked as it did when he saw it from the cockpit of the Tornado. There was a great forest beneath them, though the trees looked like moss growing around fields and lakes, a great expanse of undisturbed nature spread right out to the ocean.  
"Do you like it?" the bird asked, "The most precious natural haven on all of Mobius, and all of it mine. And yours, too. Just look at what you've come back to. Nothing in the outside world could compare to this."  
Indeed, Tails was awed beyond words. The view was stunning, and from this vantage point he could see for miles in all directions. "But there's more," Kukku announced, and he lifted some kind of remote control device, tapping at the buttons. This was answered with a low rumbling noise that echoed through the whole room.  
"What's going on?" Tails asked, but Kukku hushed him with a smile. All at once the walls began to shift, the glass pyramid that encapsulated the room split open like a great blooming flower and slid away, leaving the two of them together with nothing between them and the blue expanse of the sky. The sun's warmth bathed over Tails, and a breeze ruffled his fur. He closed his eyes and breathed it in, the clean and pure air of the lower stratosphere. He was in the cockpit again, shearing through the clouds, looking down on the world below with its stresses and trivialities. He laughed, and threw his arms out either side of him. Tails had no fear of height; on the contrary, he was in love with height, and he stood right on the edge of the building, taking in every drop of the experience. This was unbelievable, the sensation of flight captured in a jar. It was heavenly.  
"Welcome home," Kukku said from behind him.  
Tails stood at the edge a moment longer, as though parting with an old friend, and then backed away again, shaking his head in disbelief. "This is amazing," he gasped.  
"Isn't it?" Kukku pressed another button on his device and the glass walls began to ascend again. He placed the device atop an ornate pedestal, where a groove was carved for it.  
"But what do you mean when you say I'm at home?" Tails asked.  
Kukku smiled warmly again, and his blue eyes sparkled. "I told you that you are a miracle," he said, "I am so pleased you decided to return to us. We can verify the identities of your parents from your genetic code, you see. It is not impossible to have a child in Quarantine without our knowledge, despite what most of my colleagues would attest. Nature found a way, it seems. The miracle is that we did not even know that you existed until you came back to us."  
"You knew my parents," Tails said, realisation blooming. "I'm on the Kitsune Atole, aren't I."  
"No finer place on all the planet, my boy."  
"I can't even remember coming here."  
"The genetic code can tell us absolutely anything about a person," Kukku said, "Except, of course, his name. That is something that only you can tell us. Might I ask what it is that we can call you?"  
"Tails. Tails Prower."  
Kukku laughed, truly amused. "Tails! Well now, that is _certainly_ appropriate, isn't it! Truly a fine name. A _fine_ name. And _Prower_, of course, the name of your father. I remember him, you know. He was a fine specimen of a creature, very healthy, very potent genes. I knew he had a lot of potential, and clearly I was right. I was sad when he left. I see that he hasn't returned with you... that is a pity."  
"He died. He was killed, I mean."  
"Oh... I am sorry to hear that. Very, very sorry." Kukku slouched his shoulders and hung his head, his long beak pointed to the ground like an arrow. "The world out there is like that. _Barbaric_. Primal. Untamed. So juvenile. So many people dying for so many futile reasons. Killing and dying. Not here, though. We maintain this little slice of heaven as a beacon for the world. The research that we do here, we're going to change the face of Mobius some day. Some day..."  
"What do you research?"  
Kukku's spirit's brightened and his smile returned. He had a very contageous smile, Tails found it almost impossible to keep a straight face. "Oh, I'll tell you all about it," the bird said, "Another time. After dinner, perhaps. For now there is so much to do! We weren't prepared for your arrival, but I've seen to it that you have a room fully furnished. I'll take you there now, if you would like to see it."  
"You've made up a _room_ for me? You want me to stay here?"  
"Oh, Tails... I want so much for you to stay. In fact, I'd like to try and convince you to join our family."  
Family. The one thing Tails had sought all of his life. The very word put a smile on his face, bedazzled as he was with the heavenly palace in the sky. He asked to see his room, and Badoru Kukku was overjoyed.

---

**11:23 am**

"I don't understand why you want to do this," Tails said, "Why you're showing me all this. Taking me in and healing my injuries and everything. What's so special about me?"  
Badoru Kukku was still smiling as they walked down a long spiral staircase. "Oh, you're very special indeed," he said, "You validate our work, my dear. You are a beacon of hope. Your very birth is going to be an inspiration to all of our people. I cannot wait to show you off."  
"I _still_ don't understand."  
"You will. Very soon, you will."  
The staircase twisted and curled down from the garden penthouse like the belltower of an old cathedral. The stone walls were a little suffocating, but it didn't look as though there was far to go. He could see a light ahead.  
"You are the future, young Tails," Kukku said, and Tails thought he could even hear a trace of a sob in the bird's voice. "You are the proof that mobiankind can elevate itself, that it _is_ evolving, slowly and steadily, toward greatness. Some of my colleagues were convinced that my beloved Cremaria was an aberration, but now there can be no question."  
They reached the bottom of the spiral staircase, and the shock of what Tails saw almost sucked the air from his lungs.  
The stairs ended with a freefall. A circular platform that hovered above an abyss of nothing. There were no rails and no barriers. They were standing, it seemed, at the top of a huge, hollow tower. In a way it seemed half-built. The walls were packed tight with rooms, doorways opening up to nothing. There were towers within towers, great columns made of open rooms, stacked one on top of another. Hundreds of rooms, hundreds of platforms, and all of them swarming with people.  
It was a vertical city. The strangest thing about it was that there were no connecting paths, no stairways between rooms, no bridges of any kind. And the people didn't seem to care in the least, because they were all birds.  
Dozens of them were flying about at any given moment, flitting from doorway to doorway. In fact, it was clear that bridges and stairs would only ever serve as a hindrance. They didn't need them. These mobians had a transport much more efficient than walking. The sound of flapping wings echoed constantly throughout the building and merged into the background, just as one gets used to the sound of traffic along a busy highway.  
"Welcome to Sanctuary," Kukku declared, "The beacon of the civilised world. Soon we shall be a guiding light for all of Mobius. This is my dream, Tails. This is my gift to mobiankind. And I want you to be a member of my family, my dearest child, because you are one of the first pioneers of a new age. This is why you are a miracle, Tails. You have crossed the biological schism that truly seperates us from the barbarians. You have made the greatest evolutionary leap! _Flight_, Tails! You have achieved _flight!_"  
Tails watched the people of this floorless city dart to and fro from one room to another without a worry in the world, and imagined how wonderful it must be to throw off the shackles of one's planetbound prison, and truly be free. It occurred to him at this moment that this _really was_ the home he had always sought. This was his paradise. A tear tracked its way along his snout and perched upon his nose until he sniffled it away. This was his home.  
"I'll show you to your room," Kukku said, "Just follow me." And with that, he flicked away his robes to display his impressive wingspan, and dove from the platform, circling downward until he vanished into the flock. His robes trailed behind him like a fluttering, colourful cape.  
A shiver ran down Tails' spine. He wasn't afraid of heights, but then he'd never been asked to leap into an abyss before. Kukku may not have known it, but Tails' flight didn't work the same as that of a bird. He needed a boost, and even then he only had a few moments before he would exhaust himself. If he simply walked off the edge of the platform, he'd fall to his death. If he could fly like a bird, then he wouldn't need a plane.  
One of the mobian birds flew close past him, and he felt the wind from the wings. It blew his hair back with a _puff_ and he imagined himself flying freely as they did. They had no constraints in heaven or Mobius, they almost willed themselves to a location and they were there. They really did possess a gift that had only been half-granted to Tails, and he envied them for it. He wanted to be them, if only for a moment. If only for two.  
Spreading his arms out either side of him, Tails closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He pictured the vast blue sky, scattered white clouds like cottonbuds, calm and cool. He flexed at the knees, once, twice, then leaned forward. If he was to die today, then he would die in flight and thus carry no regrets. He would die free; he would die a bird.  
Tails jumped, dove forward off the platform and spun his tails like the rotor of a small helicopter, just as he always did, although this time he did not ascend. He threw his arms out in front of him and _launched_ himself in a controlled dive. His spinning tails worked somewhat like a parasail, slowing his descent as he glided through the building. He pulled to the side very quickly but only narrowly avoided a head-on collision with a brick wall. He zipped past dozens of doorways that opened into thin-air, felt the jetstream of scores of flying birds, and realised that this was a very dangerous activity. He was travelling very quickly, circling downward, and searching madly for any sign of where he was going. The tower was a honeycomb of rooms, the portals wide, somewhat elliptical, and almost identical. They streaked past his vision and he began to grow dizzy.  
Only a flash of vibrant colour brought back his bearings. Badoru Kukku's brilliant cloak, trailing behind him as he flew. Tails twisted his body and aimed his trajectory toward it, conscious that his powerful tails were getting very weary and strained at the constant spinning, twisting and curling. If they cramped up, he would freefall. It was crucial that he land very soon, on _something_.  
Kukku took a hard left in mid-air and dove, a bit of ostentatious flying that was clearly meant to impress, and vanished again into the flock. Tails tried to follow but he couldn't turn so well, and he again almost crashed. He ran along the curved wall for a few metres before pulling away and levelling off again, and just spotted Kukku darting into one of the doorways. He followed, his tails aching, and nearly fell short of the hole. He crashed inside the room, rolling a short way until he landed in a pile of soft pillows.  
Badoru Kukku was laughing as Tails fought with the pillows, panting. Kukku had, of course, landed perfectly.  
"You still have some difficulty in using your talents," he said, "You'll learn very quickly, here. Everyone is going to be so anxious to teach you! As will I, of course, and your sister Cremaria. All of us, one family of the air."  
Tails crawled out of the pillow pile a little cranky, a bruise already forming on his behind, but he immediately forgot his pain when he saw the room around him.  
It was beautiful.  
A bed was draped in soft blue curtains of satin and silk. Upon it were cushions so soft that they looked as though they might fly away like balloons. The floor of the room was polished oak, furnished with fuzzy rugs, and the walls were an unoffensive cream-white and decorated with landscape watercolour paintings. Tails could see a large, elegant wardrobe and dressing table setting, a huge pine desk, and a window that took up almost an entire wall, looking out at the clouds and the horizon from this unbelievable vantage point.  
"My God..." Tails muttered, "It's gorgeous."  
"Yes. Oh, but my boy, this is only the surface. There is so much more for you to see and experience." He smiled. "But we'll speak of these things later. We have all the time in the world. I should let you settle in! Do say that you will join us for dinner, though."  
"This is all a little daunting."  
"Yes... yes, I know it must be, but do relax and make yourself at home. You are among family, now, and it is perfectly safe within our Sanctuary. I want you to feel that you are welcome here. If there is anything you need, anything at all, just press this button."  
Kukku indicated something that looked like an intercom device beside the doorway.  
"Anything at all, Tails," he said, "And someone will arrive immediately to assist you. You're entitled to anything, you _are_ after all a member of _my_ family. My staff are paid to ensure that I and mine are comfortable. They will be happy to accomodate you."  
"Uh... thanks..."  
"I will have you collected at six so that you may join me for dinner. There are many people who are just dying to meet you, Tails, and people who _you_ will be happy to meet. Will you be there?"  
Tails' stomach was already growling a little. "Sure thing."  
"Oh, I'm so happy. I mean that." He clearly did, judging from the fireworks in his eyes. "Then I will see you at six. Feel free to explore the facility, though I do hope that you will be careful."  
With that, Kukku gave a little wave, turned, and flew out the open portal.  
Tails' attention turned once again to the room. Never in his life had he been treated to such luxury. As a child of the streets, rescued and made a Freedom Fighter, there were only a handful of times that he'd ever had a comfortable bed to sleep on, or even slept inside a proper building that didn't leak when it rained. This was nothing like he'd ever seen before. It was the kind of room he imagined a king or a prince might sleep in.  
Not for the first time today, he wondered if he might be dreaming. What an obscure, surreal kind of wonderland. Tails had expected the Kitsune Atole to be a horrible place, like the bowels of the Arack Empire, some alien nightmare from which his father had sought to liberate his enslaved people. Instead he'd been granted an instant promotion to the status of some kind of royalty. _Bird_ royalty, no less.  
Of all the situations he'd found himself in over the past few years, this was immediately one of the most puzzling.  
Badoru Kukku, whoever he was, had known Tails' father. Had respected him deeply, by the sound of it. The question was whether that acquaintance was in the capacity of a leader. Perhaps times had changed, perhaps somebody had already taken up Trevor's sword and changed things on this island. If that was so, then Tails didn't know what he was going to do here. The prospect actually saddened him a little. If he couldn't change anything here, then he had no way to avenge his father. No way to prove his life worthwhile.  
All of these problems were brushed somewhat under the shroud of Tails' immediate shock. The last thing he lucidly remembered was embarking upon his quest, to come here. Obviously this mission had been a success, but how much time had passed in between? He might have been wandering the globe for years before getting here. Tails looked into the ornate mirror above the dressing table, ran his eyes over his body. He didn't look any older.  
(and there _were_ memories. Deep, deep down. Just fragments, snapshots. Postcards from the past.)  
The cacophony of flapping wings outside his entrance was extremely distracting. He supposed that birds learned to get used to it, but doubted whether he ever would. Frowning, Tails approached the portal and looked out. Scores of birds flew past every minute, taking no notice of him. Flittering from one doorway to another. A lone feather drifted down in front of his face and landed at his feet.  
Tails found a button with his hand, and clicked it in. Immediately a tinted glass door slid across the hole and snapped shut. It cut the sound of flying birds out completely, much better than Tails had even hoped. The door and room seemed to be utterly soundproof.  
Happy with his new state of relaxing seclusion, Tails sat on the side of the bed for a moment, taking another incredulous look about the room, before lying down. He had a lot of thinking to do. A lot of remembering.

---

_Trevor Prower did not shiver before the presence of the bat in the pinstripe suit, even though the bat's hand never moved from its suspicious position underneath the desk. Rain was pattering softly upon the roof of the old church, and the ceiling had sprung several leaks, none of which the residents of this den of vice ever bothered to patch up. There was an old, dirty bathtub wedged in the aisle between two pews, catching the worst of the dribble.  
"Nails, Nails the Bat," he said as he sliced the tip off a fat cigar. "I trust you've heard of me. This is my town, after all."  
Trevor didn't reply. After a few moments, Nails grinned a jaw full of thin, yellow dagger-teeth and bit down on the cigar. He ignited a match on the desktop and lit the smoke. "It has come to my attention," he said, "that you have repeatedly been caught thieving in my neighbourhood. I find this problematic, to say the least."  
"Just food," Trevor replied, "To feed my child. We don't have any money, he'd starve otherwise. We're not doing anything we don't have to do."  
The two suits who stood either side of him, the sphinx and the crow, moved a little closer. In response, Trevor pulled Miles closer to himself.  
Nails just chuckled and shrugged. "Hey. Profits is profits is profits. Doesn't matter whether you're jacking sports cars or stealing cheese from the rats. Fact of the matter is your thieving hurts my bottom line."  
"He's only three years old, for God's sake," Trevor hissed.  
"Oh, really? Well gee, in that case, maybe we should all pitch in some cash. Hey, boys! What do you think? Why don't we all dig deep and get the kid a decent feed? Heck, scratch that, we'll give him three square meals a day. Set up a superannuation fund, drop a few payloads into his bank account, buy him a new wardrobe and a decent education."  
"Sounds like a mighty fine idea, boss," the cat replied, "Kid could be the next High Justice of the Supreme Court, he could. We wanna give him every opportunity in life, especially considering how he's a little deformed retard and everything."  
"You don't talk about my son that way," Trevor snapped.  
"Yeah, Floyd," Nails said, "Don't go talkin' about the kid like that, no reason for that kind of nastiness. We're all reasonable gentlemen here, are we not? Listen, all I'm saying is, that just ain't the way the world works. You can't just go around doing whatever you like, sooner or later you're going to be accountable to the people whose pockets you're emptying. Can you imagine what would happen if there were a thousand little kids whose daddies stole to support them? I'd go out of business!"  
"How can it possibly affect you?"  
"An example," Nails said, and dragged deep on his cigar. He puffed out a thick cloud of smoke that obscured his face for a moment. "Say there's a particular merchant, a fine businessman, who runs a small produce outlet in town. Now, he only wants to feed his kids too, just the same as you. He's got three little rug-biters at home who need to eat, same as yours. When you steal his wares, you deprive this businessman of his income, and he has to work a lot harder just to bring home the bacon for these three darling little angels." He dragged on the cigar again, and puffed the smoke out of his nose like a dragon. "Now, let's take the example a little further. Say, for example, that I have a deal arranged with this businessman. Say that the businessman agrees to filter a small percentage of his profits to me, and in return, I agree not to send the boys around to smash his spine into three pieces with a crowbar and burn his quiet little shop to the ground. It's a friendly little business arrangement of mutual benefit, everybody's happy. Say that the terms of our agreement are such that I also agree, for just a little extra, to implement my vast resources to provide this businessman and his fine family an umbrella of protection against all the scumbags in this city, not just my own. Say that I have a similar deal arranged with dozens of other upstanding business owners across town. Can you see it yet? Sure, I could go soft on you, after all you are just doing this to survive, but can you imagine what would happen if I went soft on all the poor mongrels in this city who are down on their luck? If everyone who had a kid to feed suddenly went out and started robbing my clients here and there just to make ends meet? Pretty soon all these businessmen start to wonder what it is, exactly, that they are paying me for. I start to lose a lot of income, and then I start having to do a lot of unpleasant things just to _remind_ these businessmen what they're paying me for. Things get very messy, a lot of people wind up with hospital bills they can't afford, some wind up dead, a lot of fires start very mysteriously, and all this is further weight on my profit margin because my clients can't pay me my dues. I have a reputation in this city that's very much in my interest to uphold, and in order to do so, I'm afraid I really do have to take a hard-line stance."  
Tails wrapped his arms around his father's waist, and Trevor held his son close. "I have no quarrel with you," he said, "Please. I just want to do what I can so that my son and I can survive, we've had a very difficult life."  
"Now hang on," Nails said, "I never said I was going to let you die, I'm not that kind of monster. I have an opportunity for you, in fact, a very _good_ opportunity that'll see that both you and your adorable spawn never have to worry about where the next meal is coming from again." He grinned and leaned in closer, another cloud of smoke bursting forth from every hole in his face. "Work for me," he hissed.  
"_Work_ for you?"  
"That's right! You want a job, don't you? I'm offering you one. The best thing about it is that you basically only have to do what you're already doing right now, only I tell you who you can rob, and half of what you find comes back to me. It's got security, benefits, and best of all, you'll have my protection for both yourself and your son. I'm being very generous, here, only because I like you and I feel sympathy for your plight."  
"You want my son to be subjected to life in the criminal underworld?" Trevor asked, "I don't rob people because I _like_ it, sir, it isn't my career choice, I don't want to do it for a living. I do what I can to survive. I'm sorry, but there's a difference between what you do and what I do."  
Nails frowned at this. He sucked deep on his cigar. "If you think that, then you're a fool," he said, "There is _no_ difference, none whatsoever. I do wish we could all live in a world of roses and sunshine, but the fact is that we don't. Morality is a creation, my friend, a bleeding-heart fantasy. Let me tell you a little thing about morality. In a hard world, where only the fittest survive, there are only two kinds of people - the strong, who win, and the weak, who lose. The weak people are the ones who came up with the concept of _ethics_, and why? Because they're _so freakin' weak_ that they need an excuse with which to justify their existence. I don't need ethics, my friend, because I'm a winner. The question is whether you're going to decide to be a winner as well, or whether you're going to keep being a victim and hold onto this bizarre, hypocritical notion that what you do is more _ethical_. We're in the exact same business, you and I. You only _think_ you're doing it for different reasons."  
"I get the feeling you're not going to give me much of a choice," Trevor muttered.  
Nails' grin returned, and he stubbed out his depleted cigar in an ashtray that he kept atop the former pulpit he used as a desk. "You steal to survive," he said, "If you worked for me, that wouldn't change. You'd still be stealing to survive, only it's not _starvation_ that'll kill you. It's your choice, and in this hard world, it's very rare to come across an offer this good. I am a very _generous_ person, you see."_

---

**4:53 pm**

Tails awoke to a soft rapping sound. Eyelids heavy, he glanced around and remembered where he was. The light outside was fading - midafternoon. He was shocked that he'd slept so long, but then again he had been mighty tired. Now he felt more rested than he ever had in his life, and he didn't know whether it was because of the obscenely comfortable bed, or the medical tampering of his avian hosts. Or a combination of both.  
The rapping at the door was timid, almost embarrassed, and Tails hoped that whoever was so nervous about getting his attention wouldn't mistake his inaction for irritation. In reality he was just so comfortable that it took him a little while to work up the strength to get out of bed.  
Wandering over to the other side of the room, he pressed the button to open the door hatch. He expected to see one of the birds on the other side, which was why he had a double-take when he saw who was standing on the precarious ledge that served as a doorstep.  
A young girl, a rabbit, about a foot shorter than Tails himself, looked up at him with a large pair of hazel eyes. She was about eleven or twelve, and cloaked in a kind of elaborate frilled dress. Oddly, her ears were tied together with ribbons behind her back, like a long ponytail. She knitted her hands together over her belly in a very regal kind of posture. She smiled nervously, and tried to say something (a statement she'd clearly rehearsed) but it got caught in her throat and she just kind of murmured.  
"Oh," Tails said dumbly. "Hello, there. Um."  
The rabbit curtsied, hurriedly as though it were something she just remembered she was supposed to do a while ago. Then there was an uncomfortable moment's silence.  
"Can I help you?" Tails asked.  
"Yes, hello," she said, and blushed a little. "Father sent me to meet you. I've been- I've been a little curious and he said it would be good for us to meet. If we could, I mean. If you'd like to."  
This was an awfully cryptic explanation, and Tails figured her ability to communicate coherently with him had a lot to do with the fact that she was clearly very timid and uncomfortable being here. He suddenly realised that she was confronting him while standing on a tiny platform over a deep drop, and if he was displeased with her he could easily give her a light push and send her to a messy death. That might have contributed to her discomfort. He invited her inside.  
"Your father sent you," Tails said, confused, "I don't know your father."  
"He thought we should be acquainted," she replied, "If you are to join our family."  
As she walked past him, Tails saw her from behind and noticed something very strange about her. A rabbit ordinarily had very large ears, but hers were _huge_. From where they sprouted from her head to the very tip, they were perhaps a metre long and more than thirty centimetres at their widest point, though that was hard to discern as they were folded over and tied together. They brushed the backs of her knees as she walked. Tails figured that they would keep her entire back warm and in the cold weather she could use them as a blanket. She brushed them aside so she could sit on the edge of his bed without sitting on her own ears.  
Tails frowned. "Uh, I'm sorry. Who did you say you are?"  
The girl blushed again and looked embarrassed. "Apologies, I don't believe I did. My name is Cremaria Kukku. Though it is often shortened to just Cream. You can do that, if you like. I rather prefer it."  
She spoke with the same accent as the birds, and put the same exotic and precious pronunciation to the word _Kukku_. Folding her hands in her lap, she swung her short legs around in the air a little as they didn't touch the ground from where she sat on the bed.  
"Kukku," Tails repeated, "So... your father is-"  
"Oh, I know what you're thinking. He is not my natural father, I was adopted as a child. But he is a wonderful father. He's doing some wonderful things."  
"So he tells me. This building is definitely something. I've never seen anything like it. It's a work of engineering genius! They've utilised every inch of three-dimentional space. You can't get around without flying, though."  
Looking at the rabbit, sitting there with her hands folded neatly in her lap, a question suddenly occurred to Tails. Something that didn't quite add up. He remembered her standing on his doorstep, nothing but freefall behind her, like she'd teleported there.  
"Hey," he said, "How did _you_ get here?"  
Cream giggled a little. "Same way as everybody else!"  
"But you're a _rabbit_, not a bird. You can't fly."  
"You're a fox, and you can fly."  
Tails snorted. "Hardly. I mean, in the broadest sense of the word, I guess. But I use my tails as rotor blades. To really fly you need wings. You need to be a bird, or a bat."  
"I can so fly," Cream replied, in a mildly pouting tone that made Tails struggle to keep back a smile. "I could since I was born. It's why Father took me in, it's because I'm special. Would you like to see?"  
"Go on, then," Tails replied, crossing his arms.  
Cream reached behind her back and started to untie the ribbon that held her ears together. When they were released, she shook her head to flatten them out. Tails gasped a little, for they were even bigger than he had suspected, and suddenly he had some idea of how she might have flown here. The idea was bizarre, ridiculous, but perhaps no moreso than a two-tailed fox helicopter. Cream's ears spread out either side of her like a couple of bedsheets attached to her head, and Tails could see that they were thick and very muscular around the edges, but nothing more than a thin membrane in the centre. She raised them under their own power and flexed them in the air, while her hands remained folded neatly in her lap.  
It was one of the strangest things Tails had ever seen.  
Dropping down from her perch on his bed, Cream suddenly flapped her ears like a bat's wings and lifted instantly off the ground. Her earspan was immense, and the massive things must have been heavy, but the little girl managed them effortlessly. She flew around the ceiling for a little while, bumping light fittings and knocking things off high shelves, before dropping down to land. The wind her ears generated on landing almost knocked Tails over backwards, but she handled herself as expertly as a bird who had been born to fly. Satisfied, she tied her ears back again while Tails choked on his own words.  
"That's _incredible!_"  
Cream looked very proud of herself. A little too proud, as though she'd just won an award. Badoru Kukku was evidently quite vocal about the value of his young daughter's talent, and she was overjoyed that Tails was impressed.  
"I do hope that you'll decide to stay," she said, "And I hope that we can be friends. Father and his staff are so good to me, but it does get lonesome. I had a friend once but he left and never came back. And it'd be good to have somebody else like me around. Somebody special."  
_Why not?_ Tails thought, _This is my homeland, after all. They treat me like royalty here. It's not like I have anywhere else to go._  
"This is all very sudden," he said, "I'm not even sure how I got here. I can't just decide to live here without knowing where here is."  
"But you might, if you spent some time here?" Cream asked, hopefully. "It really is the perfect place to live. We have everything that you could ever need. And we're so far from the nastiness of the world up here. So far from war and famine and disease."  
"It sure is beautiful."  
Cream nodded, and smiled. "Come. Father was hoping that you could join us for dinner. The Armada are very anxious to meet you."  
"The Armada?"  
"Father's elite council. I'll take you to the dining room."  
"Oh... okay." Tails started to walk toward the door, but Cream started giggling. He frowned and turned to her, confused. "What is it?"  
"You can't go like that!"  
"Like what?"  
"You're naked!"  
Tails looked down at himself. He didn't wear clothing, he never had. Occasionally in the winter he'd thrown on a shirt, but his fur alone provided a great deal of warmth. He couldn't understand why it would be a problem.  
"So what?" he asked, "I'm not cold."  
Cream giggled again and Tails started to grow modest about his body. He found himself trying to hide one of his tails from view, as he often did around strangers, but it was just habitual. He didn't know why he should feel modest around a rabbit with ears the size of wings, or what right she had to laugh at him.  
"You can't get around like that," she said, "It's uncivilised. That's what comes from living out in Terra Nullius."  
"Living where?"  
"The untamed lands. The wilderness. Come, Father said there's some clothes here for you."  
Embarrassed, Tails went with her to the wardrobe to investigate. They looked through the items that had been left for him, but to his dismay, they were just a bunch of very retro-looking and old fashioned suits. Tails had never slipped on a pair of pants, let alone a suit, and these were hardly his preferred style. He hoped the pants wouldn't fit him so that he would have an excuse not to wear them, but they were specially tailored for mobians with large tails, and even with two such appendages, the pants fit him like a charm. His tails poked out a neat hole in the back. The top half was next, and even though he struggled to figure out how to tie up his tie, he still avoided looking into the mirror. If he looked even half as ridiculous as he felt, then the shock wouldn't be worth it.  
Cream helped him with his tie and his shoes, and combed his hair. It dawned on him that she was enjoying this immensely, and wondered whether there were any other children in this whole complex for her to play with. Tails had grown up without the company of other children and had missed out on a real childhood, so he knew the pain. This youngster needed friends, other little girls to play dress-up and braid each other's hair and relish the few years of true innocence that she had. Already they had her speaking and acting like a thirty-year-old, and she was barely in the double-digits.  
"You look great!" she declared.  
"Sure," Tails murmured, "I feel like I can barely move." He didn't understand the purpose of the tie, why anybody would want to choke himself in the name of fashion. He squirmed like a five-year-old in the suit and couldn't wait to get out of it. Cream was overjoyed, and took him to the open door.  
"Wait a second," he said, looking out into the open tower as birds flew back and forth, their flapping wings echoing throughout the building. He looked up to where his view ended in darkness, the ceiling too high to see, and then looked down to the same vision. Like a bottomless pit. He didn't fear heights, but then he liked to at least be able to see what was below him. "Are we going up there?"  
"Yes."  
"That's going to be a problem. My ability... it isn't true flight, I can only get about a dozen feet before my tails cramp up and I descend. Even getting down here was difficult. I'm not sure I can get around in this place."  
"Take my hand," Cream replied, and she held it out.  
"Huh?"  
"Take it."  
He did so, and she squeezed back tightly. "Now," she said, "On the count of three, jump into the air with me, and do your thing. Okay?"  
Tails didn't know exactly why, but he trusted the young rabbit. More than being a little girl, she was a girl in which Tails saw a version of himself. At her age, he had still been engaged in a struggle to discover what he was, and why. Nails the Bat had never missed an opportunity to remind him that he was a freak, even though his abilities were paramount to Nails' interest in keeping him around. He had lived among adults through his entire childhood and wrestled with the curse and blessing of his mutation. It defined him, it swallowed his entire identity. His tails were who he was, he even adopted them as his name. _Miles Prower_ could have been anybody, but _Tails_... say that, and everyone knew who you were talking about. And he feared that Cremaria Kukku was living under the same curse. After all, it seemed they had both been adopted purely for the fact that they could use their random deformities for the purpose of flight.  
How often did her father remind her that her ears were her identity?  
"One. Two. _Three!_"  
Tails jumped, and Cream did the same. For a moment they seemed suspended in midair, beyond gravity, beyond time. Tails closed his eyes and spread his arms out. He leaned forward and spun his tails in the motion that had become second nature to him over the years. This was different, though. He didn't just bounce high into the air and drift down again as he always did. This time he rose quickly, and rose, and rose, and rose. He opened his eyes and saw that he was still holding onto Cremaria's hand, and she was flying through her own power. She bore the weight of him with her powerful winglike ears, and he found that he wasn't cramping up or growing tired.  
_Holy smokes,_ he thought, _I'm flying. I'm really, actually flying. Like a bird._  
Tails hadn't felt a rush like this since the day he first realised he could use his tails for propulsion. For the first time he was experiencing true flight, without the aid of machines. This felt to _right_ to him, so natural that for a moment he wasn't sure how he could ever bear to walk again.  
He laughed as they flew together, every bit as able as the birds who circled around and past them in this glorified aviary, and he felt the wind rush through his hair as never before. Oh how he wished more then ever that he hadn't been forced to wear this heavy suit, so that he could experience this feeling through his fur and over his body. Together they swooped and glided and ascended, showing off to one another, and Tails felt like a child again. This moment stripped away his responsibilities and pressures. Nothing existed apart from him, Cream, and the air around them, in his hair, in his lungs, under his arms and through his spinning tails. He lived for this moment. It was over too soon, for after only a few minutes they landed on solid ground.  
The moment Tails' feet touched down, he was greeted with an enthusiastic round of applause.

---

**5:31 pm**

About twenty birds, all in white suits and red or blue ties, stood at the entrance of a great hall and applauded Tails as he and Cream set down. Tails, shocked, didn't know what to say or do. He just stood and smiled uneasily, waiting for the fuss to die down.  
Badoru Kukku led the greeting party, and after a while he approached Tails with a broad smile and his arms spread out to either side. He knelt down in front of Tails, put his hands on the fox's shoulders, and planted a kiss on both of his cheeks (insofar as it was possible to kiss with a beak). Tails was embarrassed by the affection and stood (probably rather rudely, he figured) with his arms by his sides.  
After gushing over Tails for a moment, Kukku turned to his adopted daughter, giving her a hug and a kiss on the forehead. He then stood and turned to the audience of white-suited birds.  
"Behold!" he announced, "After nearly four decades, the results that we have all anticipated. These two mammalian youths _flew_ here under their own power. They survive competently within an environment constructed specifically for avian capabilities. These children are the future, gentlemen. They represent the final phase. Our project is nearing completion."  
Tails didn't understand what any of this meant, but it was met with another fierce round of applause from the audience. Kukku took his hand, and Cream's, and led the two of them through the crowd toward the hall, where two long tables were set up with glasses and cutlery. Again, Tails was blown away by the elaborate beauty of it all. For most of his life he'd been a homeless kid, sleeping in an abandoned church and stealing to survive, completely unaware that he was considered something like royalty on a far-away island. It was so ironic that it hurt.  
While he was being led toward the tables, people were touching him, as though they didn't believe that he really existed. Somebody ran their hand along one of his tails, and he didn't like it. He wrapped them both around his waist and walked a little faster.  
Somebody grabbed him by the arm, but with force. He turned around to come face to face with a bird who, unlike the others, was dressed all in black. His feathers were as black as his suit, which was adorned with a bright red tie, and a tall crest of black plumage sprouted from his head. Also unlike the others, he didn't seem happy to see Tails. In fact he looked downright sour.  
(and you've seen this one before, buckaroo)  
(overdr-)  
"You are not one of us," the bird hissed at Tails, "It would do you good to remember _that_, yes. Do you very good indeed, savage."  
He relinquished Tails' arm and vanished into the crowd of gawkers. Tails searched for him, trying to figure out why he had seemed so very familiar, but Kukku took him by the hand again and guided him away.  
"Take a seat, my boy," he said, "You sit with me, at the head of the table. You are our _special_ guest."  
Tails, grunting with discomfort in his suit, sat upon a chair that was too high for him, and tried to keep his eyes from rolling out of his head when he saw the silverware in front of him. He restrained his old instinct to slip one of the forks away when nobody was looking. If these were still the old days in Station Square, it probably would have fed him for a month.  
(you need never go back to that, miles, never again)  
"So tell us," one of the birds said, and Tails tore his attention away from the cutlery. "What is it like, out there?"  
"Out where?" Tails asked.  
"Terra Nullius! The untamed wilderness, the rough lands. Badoru has told us that you've lived most of your life in the world beyond. However did you survive it on your own?"  
"Clearly his evolution provided him an advantage," another bird said, "He would naturally be elevated above the riff-raff. A god among mobians."  
"Actually, um-" Tails stammered, but held his tongue. He didn't feel like telling these people that he'd lived his life on the streets. How embarrassing, given the extravagance of his current treatment. What if they discovered his past and changed their minds about him? What if they thought he was scum, and swept him outside with the garbage? He looked at the loving expression on Badoru Kukku's face and cleared his throat.  
"Well, it's hard," he said, "But I survived. That's all you can do, you know, just... just survive."  
"But you came back to us," someone else said, "That proves everything that we have theorised! The epoch that all things tend toward! Your superiority has drawn you to seek others like yourself. You've returned to the pinnacle of civilisation."  
To Tails, it sounded like these people might have been speaking a foreign language. He just smiled and nodded and allowed these strangers to fawn over him while he enjoyed the perks of their attention. He glanced at Cream and she winked at him.  
Tails and Cream were the only people here without beaks and feathers. The birds around the table were all dressed in white, but there were others, all of them standing and all dressed in black, who appeared to be guards or police. They stood by the doorways, mostly. One of them was staring at him - the same bird who had grabbed him earlier and issued a stern warning. The one with the black crest, who Tails found eerily familiar.  
It wasn't long before dinner was served. It was the best meal Tails had ever eaten. A feast fit for royalty, and indeed that was what he felt like. The birds, the group Cream had referred to as the _Armada_, ate heartily and with great mirth, chatting and laughing and playing like brothers and sisters at the world's largest family dinner table. There seemed no bad blood between any of them. A family indeed. One huge family, of which Tails had been invited to become a part. He ate heartily and in good company, but even so he was cautious. He didn't want to drip anything on his suit, or slurp his food, or do anything in a manner that might reveal his less than privileged upbringing. And while he ate, he tucked one of his tails under his body, out of sight.  
After dinner, as the guests began to disperse, Kukku and his adopted daughter pulled Tails aside to speak with him.  
"I would like to show you something. Follow me."  
Once again, Tails took hold of Cream's hand, and the three of them together - bird, fox and rabbit - flew upward and away. Once again, Tails settled into the sensation of true, uninhibited flight. He was already picking it up as second nature (or first), ducking and weaving and ascending in time with his guides, and with every bit as much skill. It seemed that his entire life had served only as a practice for this.  
This is what he had been born for. This was his reason to live.  
The three of them landed in a room that looked like it might have been a research laboratory. Kukku flicked on the lights, and revealed dozens of computers, hooked up to strange and expensive-looking equipment, lights and dials blinking in the dimness. Sickly liquid sat stagnant in glass vials. Rows and rows of little clear boxes covered a circular table in the center, and what was inside each one, Tails couldn't even hazard a guess.  
"I have sensed that you are confused," Kukku said, "About what we do here. About your place in our sanctuary."  
"You keep calling me a miracle," Tails replied, inspecting the laboratory with great interest. "I guess I have trouble understanding why. It has something to do with my tails, right? Because I can fly... like you."  
"Ah yes, but there is so much more, young Tails, so much more for you to understand. For you to fully appreciate the work that we do here... You need to comprehend the science that drives us, the true nature of the world as it is. You need to know _why_ your birth is a great victory for us, and not just for us but for the entire world, all the people of Mobius. You are a gift, Tails. You are the _future_."  
"Father, you _do_ like to carry on," Cream said, giggling.  
"Oh!" Kukku exclaimed, "There I go, _rabbiting_ on again, eh?" He winked at Cream, who shrank a little and blushed. The bird strode across the lab with great purpose on his long, bean-thin legs, raising one winged hand and pointing to a poster on the wall. The poster had images of four mobians standing side by side, arranged like anatomy diagrams. From left to right; a spider, an iguana, a fox not unlike Tails, and a bird.  
"All mobians are not born equal," Kukku explained, "There are four distinct groups of anthric mobian in the world. As you see here - The arthropodians, the reptilians, the mammalians and the avians." He pointed to each image. "While members of each of these groups typically share similar characteristics, there are vast differences _between_ groups. And nobody can interbreed _across_ groups. For example, while a mammalian couple of differing race, let's say a squirrel and a hedgehog, have the ability to produce children together, it would be impossible for a mammalian to breed with, for example, a reptilian. Do you understand?"  
"Sure."  
"Do you know why?"  
Tails thought about it. He didn't have the same aptitude for biology as he did with physics. "Not really."  
"Well you see," Kukku continued, "Like our zoic counterparts, we mobians are subject to a force of nature known as _natural selection_. In any closed biological system, such as Mobius, organisms will tend toward more efficient, more _successful_ forms, through random mutations and such. Given enough time. The weaker, less efficient, inferior models die away due to competition with more successful organisms."  
"Okay."  
"Say for example a herd of animals live in a field and eat the leaves that hang low off the tree branches. Some of the animals are born taller than others, and can reach higher branches. Eventually the herd grows too large, and they eat away all the leaves on the lower branches. With no food, the shorter animals all die, but the taller ones survive because they can reach food that the others can not. Natural selection. Nature picks out the better creatures while the others fall behind. This simple, automatic process has given us the vast diversity of life that we see all around us." Kukku dramatically spread his arms as wide as he could, and his wings draped down like curtains.  
"Sure," Tails replied. Made sense. He scratched the back of his neck in the spot where his suit was chafing him.  
"Mobiankind is subject to the same forces. The same diversity. The same _rhythm_. Evolve and purge. Evolve and purge. Evolve. Purge. Each of these four groups of mobian have evolved from one another. Each is more successful in civilisation than the former. The arthropodians have been here the longest... brutish people, just bugs with brains, really. Violent and uncouth. The world will fare much better to be rid of them."  
Tails thought about the Arack Empire, and was inclined to agree.  
"The reptilians," Kukku continued, "Evolved directly. And the mammalians in turn from them. And finally, at the top of the evolutionary chain, the avians. Birds, such as myself and my colleagues. We are the newest mobians, recipient to the greatest gift that nature has ever bestowed upon mobiankind, the gift that enables us the greatest advantage over all other civilisations around the world."  
"Flight..." Tails muttered aloud.  
"Flight," Kukku confirmed, "The one gift that enables us to eliminate from neccessity all manner of transportation technologies, from planes to bridges. We are true masters of this planet, able to reach any place on the ground or above it. Here in our Babylon, in our Sanctuary, we have created the closest thing to a perfect society anywhere on Mobius. And we would like nothing more than to spread our utopia across every inch of the planet, tame the wild lands of war and poverty and misery. This is my dream, Tails, it always has been. A wonderful, civilised world."  
"How are you going to do that?" Tails asked, "I mean, this is a _natural_ process, right? What's all this going to do?" He motioned around the lab.  
"Ah, but you see, when you _understand_ the process, as we do, then the process can be assisted. By science." Kukku stood behind Cream and rested a tender, fatherly hand upon her head. The girl smiled.  
"The reason," he said, "that the four mobian groups cannot interbreed is because nature is preparing them for a purge. The biological schism is widening, isolating the inferior groups from the gene pool. The arthropodians... the reptilians... they will all vanish eventually, will probably wipe themselves out in war. They are too primal, barbaric, beyond hope. But the mammalians... people like you, Tails, and Cremaria, you can be _saved_ from this fate. _That_ is our mission here. To evolve the world. To help the untamed world evolve beyond its inadequacies and achieve true civilised harmony. A new age... brothers and sisters of the sky."  
"Wait a second..." The penny dropped in Tails' mind. He saw the equipment laid out around the lab, the samples in the clear boxes, the glass vials, the diagrams covering the walls. He looked down at his hands... his arms, down his body... his twin tails... "_You_ did this? You did this deliberately? You _made_ me this way?"  
"Not entirely," Kukku replied, "Your success, and that of Cremaria, was serendipitous. _Nature_ found a way. But it found a way _through_ us. Genetic science is extremely complex and rarely predictable. There are many unexpected successes... and failures. But we have made advancements beyond anything that anybody else on the planet has ever imagined."  
"You're engineering birds out of foxes and rabbits."  
"We are doing precisely what nature intended. We are creating _evolution_. Enabling everybody to share the benefits of superior genetics. You two, my beloved children, you are the first. The proof that we have almost achieved our goals, our dream. Soon we will raise an entire generation of children bestowed with our gift, and the untamed world will share in the fruits of _true_ civilisation."  
A tear trailed its way down Badoru Kukku's cheek. He wrapped an arm around Cremaria, who returned his embrace with a mirthful grin. Tails, hands trembling, took a step back from them.

---

**8:42 pm**

So many things became clear to Tails as he lay in the luxurious bed that the birds had provided him and pondered. The mysteries of his life were falling into place like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.  
The Armada were meddling in genetics. They seemed to have been doing it for some time. When Tails' uncle Tyler had come to New Knothole, he had spoken of a place where the ruling class were using genetics to alter people's appearance. It was now clear that he had been speaking of the Armada, these warm-hearted avian scientists and their esteemed gentleman leader Badoru Kukku. They had given Tails his namesakes, not to make a freak of him but to try to _elevate_ him, make him better. These were the people that Tails had come here to stop. Tyler and Tails' father had called them evil, and Tails had imagined a brutal tyranny not unlike Robotropolis during Robotnik's reign, a horrible and twisted autocracy of suffering. What he'd found instead was a place of peace. A group of idealists with some strange ideas, but none of them hateful.  
Had his father been wrong about these people? Misjudged their intentions? The answer to that question didn't lie here, in Sanctuary, the avian utopia. Tails knew there was only one way to see this from his father's perspective.  
He had to go outside.  
Cremaria Kukku, eleven or twelve, bird by proxy, must also have been tampered with. Somewhat more successfully than Tails. It seemed that the Armada's strange vision to attach wings to creatures not otherwise built for them was coming closer and closer to fruition. Using her ears, she could fly every bit as well as a bird  
(_or a bat_, his mind whispered amid a vision of Nails' snarling maw)  
but it was not God or nature who had assured her this skill. She had been built for a purpose, in much the same way as Sonic the Hedgehog had originally been designed to fulfil a schematic. The same way, apparently, as Tails himself had been designed.  
What an eerie parallel.  
He looked at Cream, who was sitting on his floor with her ears wrapped around herself and staring back up at him with more respect and admiration than he would expect from someone who just met him.  
"Cream," he said, "There must be people around here. Not birds... mammalians, like you and me. The people your father conducts his... research on. Where are they?"  
"You mean Quarantine. The little town in the valley under this tower."  
"A town. Have you ever been there?"  
"Sure, I go there all the time."  
"And they're... happy?"  
Cream looked a little confused. "Why wouldn't they be?"  
"Some people might not like having their genes tampered with."  
"Father is doing a great deal of good for them," Cream retorted, "They are very lucky. _We_ are very lucky. They all know this. They are treated very, very well." She looked as though she was starting to get a little offended, so Tails didn't push the issue.  
"I'd like to go there," he said.  
"Father and I are visiting Quarantine tomorrow," she replied, "I am sure that he would love for you to join us. He is very proud of them. He loves showing off and talking to you about his work, it makes him very happy. He says it's exciting to talk with somebody who is intelligent enough to understand and appreciate the work."  
Cream spoke of her father in a glowing, almost worshipful tone. Her love for him made Tails ache inside. It was the same love that he had felt for his own father. The love that he had come to feel for Sonic. Now that he had nobody, Tails' love was at a loose end. Was it possible that he might come to feel the same love for this saintly feathered scientist as Cream did? He never doubted the filial love that the two of them shared, even despite the vast racial chasm between them. And he didn't doubt the love that Kukku had for him, even though they had never met before today. The bird was willing to take him in as a son, rescue him from his pain in the same way as Sonic had, asking nothing in return.  
But he was his father's enemy. This was the problem, the paradox. His father's enemy had taken him in as a son, and this could only lead to a powerful conflict. Tails could already feel it welling up inside him. So strong was his sense of duty to avenge his father that living here would be almost an act of treason for which he didn't know if he could forgive himself. But such was his need for what Kukku offered him that to reject it, to go back to the life he had before, would be a betrayal against himself. To turn his back on the only place in the world where he might not feel and be treated like a freak... he didn't know if he could forgive himself for _that_, either.  
"Do you remember your real parents?" he asked Cream. "I mean, before you came here."  
The little rabbit closed her eyes and her head drooped a little. "I remember my mother," she said, "Just a little bit. Pictures. Broken images. She is smiling at me."  
"What happened to her?"  
"I'm not sure." She shook her head. "She got sick. I don't remember, I was very young. I remember that I loved her very much. Father tells me that she must have been a saint, because she made a little miracle. That's what saints do. Make miracles." A small tear tracked its way down her cheek and came to a rest under her chin.  
"But life is good here, right?" Tails asked, "I mean, these people, the Armada... they treat you well?"  
"They love me. I love them. Most of them. It is a little difficult, though, knowing... I _am_ different, I know that, even though they treat me like one of them, I know I'm not really. When there is nobody else like you around, it can be hard. I did have a friend, once, he was just a little broken robot. I called him Tock. He kept me company. But he went away a little while ago, and I haven't had anybody... until now." She looked up at Tails and beamed.  
"Wow," Tails replied, "You could easily have just described my life." He sighed and sat up in bed. "I know how it feels. After my Dad left... it was like there was nobody in the whole world who could have known what it was like to be me. My whole life I've been called a freak. I had a friend, too, and he showed me that I was worth something, that there was more to me than just some kid mutant. He went away too... that's kinda why I'm here."  
"Tell me about him?"  
"He was a good person. One of the last truly good people, I think. You would have liked him. He was a real hero, to the core. The best friend I've ever had... really the only true friend I've had, but I couldn't ever have had a better one. He was an... an _inspiration_, I think you could say. That's why I'm here. It's for my father's honour, really, but I wouldn't have any idea what honour was if it hadn't been for Sonic. I still can't believe he's gone."  
"What happened to him?"  
Tails sighed again. "Your Dad said it best, I think. It's a cruel world out there. It just doesn't make sense. After all, he's been through so much, he's fought monsters and gods and empires and come away without a scratch... but something got to him. He was taken in the night, in the rain. The world just opened up and swallowed him. I never saw him again."  
Trying hard to keep strong in front of the little girl who looked up to him, Tails choked back a sob in the face of the images that came rushing back to him. Tyler Prower, his uncle, had been host to the horrid beast who had taken the life of his father... and then returned years later to take Sonic, as well. In this way, Tails was as haunted by Nightmare as Tyler. For this realisation, Tails knew that, although he didn't blame Tyler for Nightmare's actions, he could not stay with his uncle. The monster inside him would continue to kill everyone in his life that he cared about.  
Cream just frowned a little at his explanation, as though it didn't satisfy her. It would have to do, though, because Tails didn't intend to delve much further into the story behind Sonic's death. It was too painful.  
The girl said, "Are you sure that your friend died?"  
"Yeah," Tails replied, "He's gone. It kills me to know it, but..."  
"You said you never saw him again. Perhaps he is still out there, somewhere?"  
Cream's innocent optimism and persistance started to irritate Tails a little, particularly as she was giving voice to a fantasy that Tails already held deep within himself. The fantasy that Sonic was still alive. After all, what evidence did he truly have that the hedgehog was dead?  
Tyler had tearfully admitted to both Trevor's demise and Sonic's, one night on the road between the Great Forest and Catilina city. It was something that Princess Sally had evidently already known for some time, but kept to herself. Sonic had stepped out into the rain one full moon night, stepped into Nightmare's domain, and disappeared.  
Yet there was no body. No remains. Could Nightmare really have consumed him whole? Spines and all? Without evidence, all there was were the suspicions of a fox who had no memory or knowledge of the acts committed by the beast inside. Guesswork at best.  
But what other explanation was there for Sonic's disappearance? If he wasn't dead, then where was he? Tails just couldn't hang on to false dreams, artificial hopes.  
"Wish in one hand, crap in the other," he mumbled.  
"Sorry, what did you say?"  
"Nothing." He shook his head. "I should probably try to get some sleep. It's been a long day."  
"Yes. It has." Cream smiled at him again. Mature before her time, the little girl occasionally showed a sign that there was indeed a child in there somewhere. Tails smiled back.  
"So I can come with you tomorrow? Into Quarantine?"  
"I do hope so. It's wonderful there."

---

_After you rob enough people, you lose the ability to quite recognise them as people. At first it's a deliberate process. It just makes it easier to do what you have to do if you don't have to carry around the weight of guilt. You desensitise yourself, tell yourself that these people are not like you. They don't know your life. They have never been as low as you, nor will they ever be. What you steal from them can feed you for a week, and they'll think it nothing but a mild inconvenience.  
They don't care about you, you say, so you don't care about them.  
This was how Trevor Prower lived with himself day to day. In Station Square, there was one law, and that was the law of the jungle. There was a food chain in this city. These people who walked the streets as calm as cattle, as mindless as herds of buffalo, they were the prey. Faceless, unfeeling herbivores. Trevor was not the predator, however; No, no. He was a scavenger, a parasite, feeding upon carrion and the dead excess of live beasts. As much as he could rationalise his lifestyle, he could never think of himself as being anything greater than the layer of scum that coated the streets of this city, and that weighed on him like a bag of bricks.  
It was Nails who was the predator. Nails, with his casinos. Nails, with his puppet strings. Nails, with his cronies. Nails, with his guns. Trevor fed on these people's excess, but Nails swallowed them whole and spat out their chewed bones for the vultures. In Station Square, no matter who you were, no matter what your role in life, everybody was accountable to the king of the jungle. One way or another, everybody answered to Nails the Bat.  
Tails observed this all with great interest. His father's transformation into a professional criminal happened so gradually that only the mind of a child could perceive the subtle change. Trevor Prower, once a struggling vagrant of great moral fiber, whose foray into the carnal depths of the criminal underworld once brought him great pain, embarrassment and suffering, had begun to change. He began to cool and harden like molten lava. Not that he ever enjoyed his work, not in the way that Nails did, but he did go through a kind of numbing. In the same way that a meatworker must harden his gut against the violence of his occupation, working errands for Nails was hardening Trevor's heart. Soon he was simply going through the motions, doing what had to be done. Gradually, it began to seem less like a temporary job to make ends meet and more like a career. A rut.  
Tails was never a part of his father's lifestyle at first. Trevor Prower, still a very moral individual at heart, loathed the idea of his son watching him engage in criminal acts, learning from it, emulating it. It was less his own shame than it was his fear that Tails would spend his life a lackey for Nails the Bat. But at the same time, there were very few options on the table. He could join Trevor in his daily business or he could stay in the company of Nails' thugs, and on the list of potential babysitters, a ragtag group of bandits and thieves probably weren't the most eligable candidates.  
Trevor's policy regarding Tails changed abruptly one occasion, when he discovered that Carson Crow and Floyd Tabs had been teaching his son how to play poker. He decided that, if his son was going to get an education, he'd get it from his father and not a bunch of gangsters. And what he learned was going to be of better value than gambling and deception. After that, Tails stayed with him at almost all times.  
Trevor's job originally consisted of robbery and petty crimes, but as his favour with Nails increased, the gangster allowed him to climb the ladder within his exclusive family. More important jobs came with enhanced benefits, greater security and better pay. The trade-off was that they were more deviant, malicious and dangerous. But Nails was an expert at managing staff and breaking their spirits. He might have been a psychologist, had he not decided the criminal underworld to be more lucrative. He always knew exactly which strings to pull to make people do what he wanted them to do.  
Trevor was promoted eventually to a position for which Nails provided him a car and a gun. All that Tails knew about his father's job was that he drove around all day and sometimes at night, visiting houses and docks and bridges and creepy old alleyways. Tails would get in the car with Dad in the morning and they would drive to one location after another, and just park. Trevor would get out and leave Tails alone for anywhere from ten minutes to an hour. Then he would return, get back into the car, and they would drive to somewhere else. Trevor didn't tell his son exactly what he did for a living. Tails only asked once, to which his father replied only that he was like a mailman, but that he collected things instead of delivering them, and that was good enough.  
Tails received most of his education in the passenger side of that rusty old car. His father would visit the library and borrow out dozens of books at a time for him to read while he waited. Books on every subject imaginable. Tails took in everything, but one topic that interested him more than anything else was aviation. He became fascinated with planes. Tails began to request that his father get him more information on every aspect of them, from different kinds of planes to their schematics, planes through history, famous pilots, how to fly them, novels about them. Trevor preferred his son to try to engage in something that had more relevance to life, but Tails was persistant and unyielding. He bargained for it. And Trevor, who was coming to realise that his son was almost a prodigy when it came to learning and retaining knowledge, didn't want to stifle Tails' persuit of information. He got his son what he wanted.  
Tails' fascination only intensified over time. Trevor began to take his son to visit the airport in his spare time, and they sat for hours just watching planes take off and land. Tails became obsessed with a desire to fly, himself, but his father always told him no. Perhaps one day, but not now.  
For Tails, that was not a good enough answer. If he couldn't fly in a real plane, he decided, he would build his own. So began his mission to learn how to fly. Using a knowledge of aviation physics that he learned in books and manuals, he made a great many attempts, using boxes and discarded materials, to invent his own flying machines. While all of his experiments turned out to be spectacular failures, Trevor propogated his son's persuit of knowledge as well as he was able.  
The summer when Tails saw his first helicopter, and discovered that the secret of his own flight was in his tails, was one of the happiest days of his youth. It was as though he'd found some hidden buried treasure, the key for which he'd held around his neck since birth. His father had never been prouder of him.  
That was the last day that Tails had seen his father truly happy._

---

**7:12 am**

Tails found Badoru Kukku in a lavish, spacious penthouse that was apparently his office. The walls were lined with vines and classical works of art. Marble statues of mobians, all of them avian, stood lifeless about the place, so many that one could almost be tricked into believing there was a whole crowd in this vacant room. Tails didn't recognise any of them, though they were evidently significant enough to Kukku for him to have their likenesses immortalised.  
The bird himself stood at the far window, a silhouette against the light from outside.  
"The beauty of the world is vanishing," he said aloud, without turning around, as Tails approached. "A work of art so delicate that it has been meticulously designed over millions of years, atom by atom, gene by gene. Gentle erosion and slow evolution." He shook his head sadly. "It has been estimated that a thousand species become extinct every day as a direct result of mobian activities. There has been no greater extinction since the dawn of time, when the planet Mobius was a still-cooling ball of volcanic rock, churning seas and undying storms. Such a disasterous waste. A travesty, a _holocaust_. Do you know why it is happening?"  
"I'm not sure," Tails replied, and joined him at the window, looking out at the green world below the tower. He squirmed uncomfortably in the suit he was wearing. Tails had dressed himself this morning, partly out of a desire to impress his hosts, but just as much out of his own need. For some reason, for the first time in his life, he felt _indecent_ when he was naked. His own body offended him, embarrassed him, and he felt it was the only decent thing to do to cover it up. It was the _civilised_ way to behave.  
"Because mobiankind is still in its infancy," Kukku said, "Like a child breaks all his toys because he doesn't know how to handle them responsibly. See that below?"  
Tauls looked down and saw a small village at the base of the tower. Undoubtedly the mammalian villa that Cream had called Quarantine.  
"That is how they build," Kukku continued, "They take up space, they expand across the face of the world, they spread out. For comfort. Habitats are destroyed to accomodate them. So many things must die for so few of them to live. They are fickle, Tails. Young. They do not understand. But _we_... The ability to _fly_ grants us the power to live in harmony with this." He spread his arms, from horizon to horizon. Their altitude gave a brilliant, unobstructed view of the island. "This place... you call it the Kitsune Atole, but we call it Babylon. Named for a legendary place without war, without prejudice or hate, without destruction or unnecessary death. A utopia, a harmony world. It _is_ attainable, my dear Tails! By rising _above_ nature and all of its chaos, we develop the ability to _protect_ it! We are the custodians of the planet, my boy, we have evolved this way. It is our duty." He turned to Tails with a smile wide across his pointed beak. "My dear Cremaria has informed me that you wish to join us on our excursion today. To see for yourself the wonderous work that we are doing for our unenlightened brothers and sisters."  
"Yeah," Tails replied, "I'd like to see. Biology's always been my weakest science, and, well, I'd like to start learning a bit about this process." After a short consideration, he added: "I mean, if I'm going to be a part of it."  
Kukku's face brightened even more. Tails had said exactly the right thing.  
"My boy," the bird sighed, "You cannot know how overjoyed I am to hear you say that. It fills my heart with happiness. This morning we will go down into Quarantine together, as father and son, and I will show you the wonders of all that we have accomplished - that we _are_ accomplishing, day by day. Come with me."  
Hand in hand, Tails and the bird who would be his surrogate father flew through the avian complex as though they were two parts of the same being. Instilled with this new freedom, Tails allowed himself to wonder who could really be considered his true father. What was it that defined a father? Kukku loved him unconditionally, wanted only the best life for him, and could provide that life. Trevor had cast him into a life of crime under the employ of a brutal, loveless gangster, and left him abandoned. Trevor Prower and Badoru Kukku, enemies. Both had provided Tails with love and DNA. His fox half and his bird half - which seemed more real? Which seemed more pure?  
Together they landed in what appeared to be a machines factory, and dozens of avian engineers were hard at work drilling and soldering and sawing toward an unknown goal. Tails and Kukku were met by three scientists and half a dozen birds in military uniforms, one of whom was the crested stranger who had shown Tails such disgust at dinner the previous night. He didn't look any happier this morning. Cream was here, as well, and she bid Tails a good morning and gave him a shy hug.  
"Tails," Kukku said, "I don't know whether you have been properly acquainted with the captain of my guard, Lieutenant Overdraw."  
The word _Overdraw_ stabbed Tails in the center of his mind when he heard it. He recognised it, knew it well, but had no idea why. The name symbolised danger to him, a warning. He wasn't at all surprised when Kukku indicated the bearer of that name - the tall, black bird in the dark khaki suit, emblems emblazoned upon his shoulders and a crest of black fingerlike feathers upon his head. He scowled down at Tails but said nothing. He didn't have to, because his voice echoed through the fox's head like a ghostly broadcast.  
(You are so far below us that we tread you beneath our feet, yes?)  
He tried to ignore the Lieutenant, who was certainly doing his best to ignore Tails in return.  
Tails followed the entourage through the factory to a deeper corridor, but his interest was captured by the activity here, being more in his element as an engineer. He looked about the factory with excited curiosity, trying to work out what they were making and whether he could do it any better. As they passed through, Tails spotted a dim warehouse visible through a pane of glass, and what he saw inside made his stomach do a somersault. He broke away from the group to get a better look.  
"That's mine!" he exclaimed, pressing against the glass. "That's my plane! Oh man, what's happened to it?"  
The Tornado lay inside the warehouse, damaged but unmistakably recognisable. For Tails, it was almost like seeing his own child beat up and lying in a hospital bed. He had no idea how this had happened. Did this have something to do with why he couldn't remember coming here?  
"Ah yes." The voice of Kukku behind him. The bird sounded a little disgusted as he placed one feathered hand on Tails' shoulder. "Your flying machine. An interesting contraption. So primitive. The product of the flightless world of uncivilised Mobius trying to better itself. You can see how they try to evolve themselves artificially using machines... but the machines crash and kill their masters. You are lucky to be alive, my boy, trying to manipulate that _thing_ to serve your whim. In the world that I perceive for the future, there will be no need for machines such as these."  
"Don't wreck it," Tails pleaded, "_Please_ don't wreck my Tornado! I've built most of it myself, it means more to me than-"  
"It is nothing but a toy, here in Babylon," Kukku interjected, "But I decided to keep it intact. For you, Tails. Primitive as it is, it is a testament to your evolution. To build and control a machine such as this... you are a genius, my child. And that is the _avian_ in you." Tails looked up at him, and he smiled. "Look!" he said, "My engineers have even been repairing it for you. It was in much worse a state than this where you left it."  
Tails tore himself away from the sight of his damaged plane to continue on with the group. He followed them to what appeared to be the lobby of the complex, the gateway between Sanctuary and Babylon, between science and nature. A wide arena that opened out to a sprawling, beautiful garden at the base of the great tower. It was stunning, and Tails was taken aback by it. It seemed that everything he saw of the Armada's accomplishments, every new scene, was twice as amazing as the last. Indeed, if anybody on Mobius was capable of building a utopia, then surely it was these people. Tails had never seen beauty such as this.  
"Believe me, Tails, when I say that your arrival, along with my dear Cremaria's coming of age, has injected a new vigour into this project," Kukku said. "I do believe that we are reaching the final stages. The magnitude of our successes... the culmination of everything we have worked toward for so many years, _decades_. Soon we will celebrate a great and terrific victory, my boy, with you by my side."  
Tails looked out into the open world and saw the path laid out before him. Standing tall, up ahead, like a monolith. The gates to Quarantine. His birthplace. The place where he had been conceived, and within which lay the secrets to his entire existence.  
Like a pioneer, lost for years in the wilderness, Miles 'Tails' Prower slouched home.

---

**8:30 am**

Tails didn't know what to expect from Quarantine. The village's purpose, indeed its very name, might have suggested a ghetto, a kind of prison or concentration camp, where people were packed into slums and cells for easy access, waiting in abject misery for their overlords to conduct their invasive scientific experiments. That was certainly the impression given to Tails through Tyler's description of the place.  
Strangely, nothing could have been further from the truth.  
Quarantine was a quiet and homely little village, neatly maintained and instilled with a kind of relaxing holiday atmosphere. A friendly little country community, the likes of which those who had worked hard all their lives were inclined to retire to. It was truly heartwarming.  
Kukku and his entourage were met at the entrance by a convoy of citizens from within the village, a group of mammalian mobians who were all dressed in strangely old-fashioned clothing. In fact, everything about this village seemed old-fashioned, from the clothing to the old style cottages and decor. It felt a little bit like he'd stepped back in time.  
Kukku was shaking hands with a wolf who looked to be on the far side of middle-aged. The wolf was wearing a brown suit and tie, and a small set of bifocal spectacles sat on his snout. He and Kukku seemed to be quite well acquainted.  
Lieutenant Overdraw leaned over and whispered something in Kukku's ear. Kukku waved his hand in dismissal, and Overdraw appeared aggrivated but said nothing.  
"Who is that?" Tails asked Cream, speaking of the smartly dressed wolf.  
"That is Alain Bristol," she replied, "Head of the community. He has been here for a long time."  
"I see that you've brought Cremaria!" exclaimed Alain Bristol, and as he approached, a confused expression crept onto his face. "And... _another_ child?"  
Overdraw darted forward, rather menacingly, and thrust something that looked like a metal baton in front of the wolf's stride. "Watch yourself," he hissed, "Advance no further, approach not what your hands are too filthy to touch, yes?"  
"Apologies, sir," Bristol replied, and shrank back.  
"Overdraw, please," Kukku snapped. "Alain, this is Tails. He is living with the rest of us in Sanctuary. We are _very_ proud of him, he is blessed with the same skills as Cremaria."  
"How wonderful!" Bristol gushed, "Such good news!"  
"Tails," Kukku said, "Do follow. We will go into town and observe what the miracle of science is achieving."  
There were a few other villagers standing around, all of them staring at him, and all of them seemed wary to keep their distance. Tails noticed one in particular, whose face seemed vaguely familiar. It was a raccoon, his lower jaw obscured by a bushy black moustache that covered his lips like a hairy shroud.  
(you've been here before, buckaroo, you just wound down and forgot it all, these people)  
"Tails?"  
"Right," the fox said, shaking his head, "Let's go."  
The village of Quarantine was a queer little oasis indeed. Its cobblestone streets were lined with cottages that might have been made of gingerbread, and people were wandering back and forth all dressed in frilly white dresses and smart brown corduroy suits. When they saw Kukku and his entourage passing through the town, they all froze, and Tails couldn't quite tell whether it was awe or fear that would make them react in such a fashion. Surely not fear. The tall, elegant, smiling figure of Badoru Kukku inspired many emotions, but fear was not one of them.  
Lieutenant Overdraw, on the other hand...  
Tails tried to be pleasant and smile at the villagers he passed by, but they all stared back at him with equal parts confusion and apprehension. It was almost as though these people knew something of him already. They recognised him, and he didn't know why.  
The strangeness of this town did not end here. As he wandered through it, Tails noticed more and more things that made him feel slightly uneasy. Like the fact that there seemed to be no shops in this village, no doctors, no police, no cafes, none of the public amenities that one would usually find in a town... but there were libraries. So many libraries. Almost like the only thing to do here on a lazy weekend was to pick up a book and read it. Not that weekends would have any meaning here in Quarantine - that in itself was faulty logic. Because, without any amenities, without any shops or cafes or services of any kind, then what could these people possibly do for work?  
And then there was the people themselves. The more Tails looked at them, the more he developed the unpleasant notion that there was something quite wrong with them. The way they walked, and the way they looked. Slightly too skinny, with bulges in the wrong places, slightly hunched over. They all carried a proud, swaggering gait with a mild limp or lurch. Some had too much skin attached to their necks that hung down in flaps, like they had lost too much weight too fast. Their eyes were too big, their mouths too small. In fact, if not for the fact that there were so many distinct races of mobian represented here, Tails might have come to the conclusion that they were all related. He turned to the left and saw two squirrel women in pink dresses with large bonnets, ribbons hanging down and blowing in the breeze like jellyfish tentacles. They turned their heads to see him - oddly small heads on necks that were too long and thin, and one of them whispered something to the other and pointed to him. Her fingers were far too long, spindly, with a nail at the end that curled down like a claw...  
"I do love to visit here," Cream said all at once, tearing his attention away. "Wouldn't it be marvellous if the entire world were like this? It's so peaceful."  
"It's cute," Tails replied, though a light shiver was travelling up and down his back.  
"Is there anywhere like this in Terra Nullius?"  
Tails thought about Knothole village, the Freedom Fighters' stronghold, and what a haven _it_ had been. But it had also been a constant danger, with military always patrolling the borders. Everybody had always been too edgy, too on guard, to truly enjoy life. There was the threat of open war every minute of every day, the threat of sudden death, utter elimination. No such threat existed here. These people were very well protected, and had no enemies besides.  
Tails' gut churned a little as he thought about his old friends, left behind some time ago. How did they fare? For a moment he envisioned them desperately fighting off a maurauding army of Arack soldiers, falling and dying one by one by the Empire's weapons...  
He shook away the thought. No, he couldn't get hung up on _that_. Not now. Their quest was not his, their troubles none of his concern. His place was, always had been, here.  
"Probably not," he said, and looking at this queer out-of-fashion little town with its oddly contorted folk, he figured that was probably true. "I don't think there's anywhere quite like this out there at all."  
They approached a building that was much larger than most of the other buildings around town, and shaped differently. Kukku stopped by a window and turned to Tails, who looked through it, putting his hands either side of his head to block out the sunlight.  
He saw a large, spacious room in which rows of children were sitting and facing away from him. An adult, avian, stood at the front and was lecturing to them, saying things that Tails couldn't quite hear.  
"It's a school," he said.  
"There is more to civilisation than good genetics," Kukku explained, "We provide our youngsters the best education, give them every opportunity to learn the intricacies of this fascinating world. We teach in every subject - literacy, mathematics and the sciences, history, geography, music and the arts, biology-"  
_Yes, I_ bet _you focus specifically on that one_, Tails thought, _I bet you take great care in explaining to them their natural inferiority._  
"-for it is _knowledge_ that is the key to a truly advanced society. These children have a natural predisposition to learning, their brains are genetically more efficient. They are _smarter!_ As smart as an avian! This is the same gift that we have also given to you, my dear Tails."  
_As smart as an avian_, Tails thought, _That puts the phrase_ bird-brained _in a whole new light._  
One of the children in the classroom rose his hand to answer a question. Tails frowned and squinted at the child, whose species he couldn't quite discern from behind. But it had to be a bat, of course. There was no other possibility. Or so he thought, until another child, who was clearly a badger, rose his hand also. Something was very wrong, here.  
"There's something strange..." Tails said, "Something strange about... what's that? Under their arms, what _is_ that?"  
"The future," Kukku replied, and he kneeled down beside Tails to bring himself closer to the fox's level. "One of our greatest successes. Alteration Seventy-Six."  
"But they-"  
"I think that there is somebody I'd like you to meet," Kukku said.

---

**9:02 am**

When Tails had once asked his haunted uncle Tyler about his irregular appearance, Tyler had consoled him.  
"Kid," he'd said, "You could have a hundred and ten tails sticking out of your butt and it wouldn't make a lick of difference to me. You're still my boy, and you're beautiful."  
Tyler had been pretending to be Tails' true father at the time. But Tails imagined that his real father would have said the same, should he have lived to be asked. It was a powerful sentiment, and an important one for a parent to express. Because in this superficial world, looks were important. Irregularity, bumps in the wrong places or shapes that weren't entirely usual, uniqueness, was not a virtue. People were frightened by difference. It disturbed and revolted them. It carried with it unappealing connotations, unpleasant assumptions. There was no room in the world for a fox with two tails. For those who he loved, who he trusted, to make clear to him that his unusual appearance did not disgust them, did not in fact matter at all, _that_ was important. _That_ was powerful.  
And so Tails, looking down at the infant lying before him, could only hope and pray that this boy's parents made every effort to express this to him as soon and as sincerely as possible.  
The baby was half-wrapped in a thick dark shawl, held tenderly in his mother's portly embrace. She leaned over a little so that Tails could have a good look. A raccoon family - Mummy, Daddy, and baby made three. She smiled warmly as she showed off her newborn child, and her husband, with his carbon-copy smile, stood over her with a hand around her shoulders. He was the same raccoon that Tails had seen earlier, the one who seemed so familiar to him, but he wasn't occupied with that peculiarity right now.  
The baby was content. He bore the curious expression of a baby, his eyes wide and glaring (though were they a little _too_ wide?) and sucking hard on the pacifier in his tiny mouth (though was it a little _too_ tiny?) while he reached out to grab Tails' nose, as though picking a cherry off its branch. Tails could only stare at that arm as the child reached, his fingers too long, too thin...  
It wasn't really a shawl that the baby was wrapped in.  
"Alteration Seventy-Six," Badoru Kukku explained in a soft voice, "is the result of many years of gruelling research and experimentation. A carefully engineered set of chromosomes that adds a specific set of information to the genetic code. Since we fully decoded the mobian genome a number of years ago, we have been able to develop a method of manufacturing specific protein strings - additional chromosome pairs which effectively _expand_ upon the blueprint already provided within the DNA."  
"You're adding to them," Tails clarified, "Creating limbs that people wouldn't otherwise have. Building upon their design."  
"There has been a lot of experimentation. A lot of research. Many mistakes, many surprises. Genetic science is... _extremely_ complicated. But we have finally made the advances that have begun to crack the deepest, most intricate secrets. The secrets behind the _genesis_ of life itself. Now it is more a matter of refining the design."  
Kukku reached out and lightly grasped the baby's hand and stretched it out while his mother cooed over him. The baby laughed as though tickled.  
"This is very exciting for us," Kukku said. "Every child who has been conceived in Quarantine over the last thirteen years has been given Alteration Seventy-Six. A very carefully designed gene sequence. As you can see, the alterations are not a perfect success, but they are closer than ever before. When these children grow up, they will breed together, and by that time we will have further refined our gene sequence. _Their_ children might very well be the children of the revolution. A truly evolved race, saved from the tyranny of natural selection."  
"You gave a raccoon _wings_," Tails murmured.  
The baby giggled, and stretched out both of his arms. The huge membranous flaps that ran from his spindly wrists down to his waist stretched out wide either side of him. He flapped them like he was a true bird.  
"He cannot fly," Kukku lamented, "None of them can. But _their_ children... Tails, you and your sister prove it possible. A future for all of us, a future in the sky. In paradise. It is not just a fantasy, it is a _reality_. And it is imminent."

---

**9:20 am**

Badoru Kukku and his associates took great interest in the health of the winged raccoon child, and stayed for quite a while in the family's home, performing an extensive medical check-up. Tails found it almost impossible to tear his attention away. He'd never imagined anything like this. Biological upgrades, manufactured genetics, it all seemed like science fiction. And why did it seem that there was something sinister about all of this?  
Tails believed that he had seen evil in his life. True evil. But the people who he considered to fit this criteria always followed a standard set of behaviours, of ideologies. Nails, the gangster who had enslaved him in years of squalour, had been an unfathomably self-driven person. There wasn't an inch of him that cared for anybody besides himself, and he enjoyed flexing his power to the detriment, even the demise, of others. Later, Tails became acquainted with the megalomaniac Ivo Robotnik, whose actions stemmed from some kind of profound apathy. Sonic had once explained to him that some people do what they do because they are angry, upset or disturbed, whereas Robotnik did what he did because he was bored. And that was, truly, evil. But what he felt now, a sense of unease bordering almost on horror, made no sense to him. The actions of the Armada were not selfish or sadistic, they did not desire to inflict pain on suffering on anybody. Their intentions seemed to come from a genuine desire to help, and the villagers of Quarantine were entirely compliant. Tails even saw the sense in it, though the methods may have seemed alien and bizarre. He didn't think he knew anybody who wouldn't appreciate the ability to fly, should it be granted to them.  
Yet his father had seen something abhorrent in all of this. Had in fact been so horrified that he opted to escape, to take his son away from this little utopia and force him instead into a life of crime in a far away city. Right now, Tails was feeling so puzzled as to his father's motives that he was almost angry. The life he had here, in the paradise they called Babylon, was pristine. Here, nobody looked down at him for his appearance. Nobody thought him stupid or strange or dirty. He was considered something of a prince, superior, not inferior. And he would have given anything to have spent his youth here, with these people, instead of the streets of Station Square, with Nails the Bat, being jeered and spat at by the public. _Anything_.  
Why did Trevor Prower make the decision that he made?  
Cream, the flying rabbit, seemed forlorn. Tails found her sitting in an antique-looking chair and watching the team of scientists perform their medical observations on the baby and his mother. Tails sat down beside her.  
"You were right," he said, "This place really is something. I can't believe half the stuff I've seen and heard today."  
"Father is doing some wonderful work," she replied, flatly.  
"Something's troubling you."  
She turned to look at him for the first time, and forced a smile. "Oh, not really. It's just... sometimes I wonder what it would have been like."  
"What?"  
"That." She pointed, and Tails turned to look. The mother, smiling, cradling her infant child in her arms. A genuine, powerful bond of love. The child cooed and grasped his mother's nose with one altered hand. His digits were webbed like fins.  
"Having a mother," Tails said. It was a desire that he himself rarely felt. Every role model in his entire life had been male, and as such he tended toward an almost misogynistic disrespect for female authority. It was an aspect of his personality that often caused him strife with Sally Acorn, for obvious reasons. For years he'd mourned and searched for his father, but what of his mother?  
"I know her name," Cream said, speaking of her own. "Vanilla Rae. Is that not a lovely name? If she were still here, I think I would prefer to call her by her name, rather than Mother. Such a lovely name."  
Tails wasn't sure he liked the name as much as Cream did, but her lamentations about her mother gave Tails an idea that, for some reason, still hadn't occurred to him. He fretted and puzzled over the motives of his father, but who alive would know them as well as his own mother? Melissa Prower was her name. According to Tyler, she had stayed here when he, Trevor and Tails had fled the island. She, and another uncle named Yared, if he remembered right. He _did_ have family here, somewhere. A family who were to be rescued when Trevor returned as promised. Maybe he could find them, and maybe they could shed some light on this mystery. Tails had come here to fulfil his father's promise to rescue his people, but so far he hadn't found anybody who needed to be rescued.  
"Mr Kukku?" he said.  
Badoru Kukku turned around quite startled. "_Mister!_ Oh, how ridiculous!"  
Tails had a good idea that Kukku wanted him to say _father_, as Cream did. But he wasn't quite ready to do that, at least not yet. Though he questioned his real father's judgements, he wasn't yet prepared to commit that ultimate treason.  
"I was wondering if I could take a walk around."  
"Oh, absolutely, absolutely! Go and explore, acquaint yourself with our little paradise! No dangers outside these walls, dear Tails. This is not like the wild lands that you're accustomed to."  
Tails turned to Cream. "Wanna come with?"  
The girl shook her head with a smile. "I think I shall stay a while."  
He nodded and left her to her thoughts. He knew as well as anybody else that, sometimes, all a person has are their fantasies.

---

_"Wait a minute, there, Trev," Nails said as Trevor led his son toward the car. The fox turned around to the bat who stood in the doorway of his old church, smoking on a cigar and leaning against the crumbling frame.  
"What is it, Nails?"  
"Wanted to discuss something with you. Your boy, namely."  
"What about him?"  
Nails smiled and sucked on the cigar. "You take him out a lot. He gets to see a lot of the job, yeah?"  
"No sir, I don't subject him to any of that."  
"Well, maybe you should." He feigned thoughtfulness. "You know, the kid's smart. Got a lot between the ears." He tapped his own head with one finger. "If he wants, I can give him a few errands of his own. Even earn himself some pocket-money for it."  
Tails' eyes lit up. "Can I, Dad?"  
"_No,_" Trevor stressed, and his son looked forlorn.  
"Aw, come on, Pop," the bat said, "You see? He wants to! I bet he'd make a great apprentice. I bet he'd take to the job real quick. He's got a lot of pep, your kid. A lot of _spark_. Ain't that right, kid?"  
He smiled like a candy salesman. Tails liked his Dad's boss. The others weren't always very nice, but Mr Nails was always friendly and accomodating, even though his father always warned to stay away from him.  
"You don't need my son working for you," Trevor said with a venom he rarely used when talking to Nails. "You've got me, you don't need him."  
The bat's smile faded a little. "Watch it," he warned. That was all Nails ever needed to say, and it was all he meant. Just watch it. Like putting a backtalking child back in line. After that, he puffed on his cigar again and his smile returned. "Now, come on, Trev. Be reasonable. I've heard some things on the grapevine lately. I've heard your son has some skills."  
Trevor frowned. "Skills?"  
"Yeah, like, I've heard he can pull off some pretty amazing tricks with those two floor-sweepers of his."  
"_I can fly!_" Tails exclaimed, while balancing on one leg for reasons only a child would know. His father told him to hush.  
"Wowsers!" Nails replied, "Hey, you know who else can do that?"  
Tails shook his head. Nails grinned like a crocodile and pointed both of his thumbs toward himself. The boy gasped. "No _way!_"  
"Yes, way. Completely self-taught. You know, it really helps a lot, in this line of work. You can do very well. I can teach you some tricks, if you're interested."  
"That's enough," Trevor said, and ushered his son toward the car. "Thanks, but no thanks."  
"Just consider it! That's all I ask! The offer is always available."  
Trevor drove for fifteen minutes in silence, and Tails recognised and feared the expression on his face. It was the face he wore when he was furious. When Tails was in some deep trouble, his father's face hardened into this mask of bitter disapproval, and said nothing, even when Tails tried to speak. He looked that way now, and Tails, anxiety and confusion rising in his six-year-old gut, tried to read his father's thoughts through his eyes.  
"Dad?" he asked, "Are you mad at me?"  
His father said nothing. He just drove in silence for a while. When they arrived at one of Trevor's locations, he parked, turned the engine off, and sat quietly for a couple of moments. Then he turned to his son and spoke in a low, very firm, tone:  
"Miles. I want you to promise me something. Stay away from Nails. If he speaks to you, if he says anything at all, don't you pay attention to him. Don't you listen to a word he says. Have I made myself clear?"  
"Yes, Dad."_

---

**10:00 am**

Tails wondered what he would say if he was to meet his mother here. He wondered what she would say to him. Would she be happy to see him, or would she reject him? Why hadn't she joined Trevor and Tyler when they first fled this place? Was it because she had no interest in her son's future, or just because she didn't want to leave this place? This place where nobody ever had to work, where all their food, shelter and comforts were provided for, and where the only price for paradise was to allow your children to be engineered into birds, or as close to them as biology would allow.  
The school in Quarantine had been excused for recess, and Tails watched the children play in the cobblestone streets. Mammalians, all of them, the group or subspecies of mobian that the Armada considered to be the highest evolved, save for the avians. He saw all types; raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, wolves, hedgehogs, cats, all named for the zoic counterpart that they resembled, all playing together and laughing, the innocent fun of a childhood without burden and responsibility. Different races, all united as family by the muscular flaps hanging under their arms, their webbed fingers, their large, bright eyes and narrow mouths. Tails couldn't see any foxes among them, or any other evidence that he might have relatives still living here, which disheartened him a little.  
Several of the children were taking turns trying to fly, flapping their arms as hard as they could manage, squinting their eyes shut with the effort, then collapsing in exhaustion. They seemed to know that if any of them had this ability they would gain favour with the Armada, be adopted into Sanctuary and live as they did. But their bodies were still too heavy, their wings rudimentary and ineffective. Like baby birds trying to leave the nest, they flapped until they wore themselves out, but they just didn't have the potential. The next generation might indeed be a different story.  
"_Pssst, Tails!_"  
His name, spoken from behind him, so faint that it might have been his imagination. Tails turned around and at first saw nothing, just one of those adorable cottages surrounded by a hedge and a row of trees. But then, movement. There was somebody standing in the yard, in the shade of one of the trees. He was obscured by shadow, but Tails could have sworn that it was a tall orange fox standing there, motioning for him to approach. A fox, just like him. Somebody who knew his name, knew who he was.  
His family was here, after all! After all this time!  
Tails hurried to meet the stranger, but the other fox turned and fled around a corner.  
"Wait up!" Tails called, "Wait! It's me, Tails! It's Miles!"  
He ran around the cottage and looked about for the other fox, who seemed to have vanished. Why had he called to Tails and then hidden from him? Or was Tails supposed to know something that he didn't?  
"_Psst!_"  
Behind another cottage, in the next yard. Tails saw the stranger, his orange fox-tail curled around the side of the building, standing close to the corner as he waved. Tails leaped over a white picket fence, but the fox had already fled again.  
"What is this, a game?" He ran around another building, jumped a hedge and another fence, and found himself in a field at the edge of town. Somebody had planted some gardens and trees, here, in order to make a park. The trees shaded the ground just enough that this would be a pleasant place to spend an evening or a whole day, to read or take a nap or just walk about. There were benches, a stone path and a little lake with ducks. Nobody else was here, though. Presumably, everybody was in town, making a fuss about the Armada's visit. He was alone with nature, and the stranger who had beckoned him was nowhere to be found.  
Just as he was about to return to Quarantine, he heard a branch snap behind him and turned, the hairs on his back bristling. There was the stranger, standing under a tree, staring at him, not a part of him moving except for his tail, slowly curling and uncurling itself. His face was still obscured by darkness.  
"Hey," Tails said, and approached the figure slowly, "It's me, Tails. Do you know me? Do you- Do you know my mother?" He frowned. "Yared?"  
When he got close enough to see the stranger's eyes, he froze. His hands trembled, and he tried to back away but his feet forgot how to move. He'd made a mistake. Those cold eyes did not belong to the family he sought. That growling, foaming mouth. This fox was feral.  
Tails gulped. "You-"  
Before he'd uttered so much as a full syllable, the fox launched at him. With a wet, barking roar, the stranger clamped his jaws around Tails' throat, scratched at him and threw him to the ground. Tails fought to get up, but a heavy foot landed in his gut and winded him. He was dragged to his feet by the scruff of his neck, and thrown up against a tree hard enough to knock him senseless, the urgency of attack combined by the inability to fight his attacker sending him into a desperate panic. He thrashed and kicked like a drowning infant, but he was held fast, held by the neck, so hard that it almost choked him.  
"_Remember me?_" the monster barked in his face, so close that he inhaled a glob of the feral's putrid spit, making him cough and hack. He writhed and scratched at the attacker, horrified that what was holding him against the tree, choking the life out of him, was _not_ a hand, but a _claw_, something brown and scaly and strong as iron, a _talon_, a gnarled, hairless _talon_.  
"_Do! You! Remember?_" the beast roared again, and Tails  
(_trust Dalziel_)  
had an idea that he _did_ remember, though he couldn't figure out how or from when or where, just a splinter embedded in his mind, something he'd repressed.  
He screamed: "_I remember! I rem-_"  
But the assailant punched him in the gut, winding him again, and released his throat so that he could curl up in the grass and weep.  
"Retard," the other fox spat, dismissive, and waited a moment for Tails to collect himself.  
Tails, bleeding and trembling, looked up at the feral who had attacked him. He knew this mobian, like a pigeon knows its way home. It seemed like instinct, like a predator will stay away from anything that glows a certain colour. Knowledge his unconscious had learned and retained even after his conscious forgot.  
Dalziel. Pronounced Dee-_ell_, but spelled with a 'Z'. He loomed over Tails in the tatters of his unwashed clothing, one arm corrupted after the elbow in a crooked and scarred tree-branch claw. He scowled with a fury the likes of which Tails knew nothing.  
"Get up," he commanded, and fearing another brutalising, Tails complied.  
Dalziel looked him over, like a store owner inspecting some shoddy merchandise. "You ain't got a whole lot going for you, do you, kid? Still, there's something about you these hamsters want, and that's good enough for me. Listen up, there's two ways we can do this: The _easy_ way, or... well, I gotta be honest with you. You should choose the easy way."  
Tails stared at that awful three-fingered branch that passed for this guy's right arm, and decided that the easy way was probably indeed his best option. He looked around for anybody who might be able to help him, but they were all gone, all congregating around the village.  
"Ain't no hamsters around here, retard," said Dalziel, as though he knew what Tails was thinking. The boy's shoulders slumped. "What are you going to do to me?"  
"You're going to come with me, that's what. And you're gonna come _now_, or else I'll knock you to an inch of your life and _drag_ you."  
"I'll go. Whatever, just... take it easy. I'll go."  
And he did. Dalziel, his good hand clasping Tails by the collar of his ruffled suit, led him at a brisk pace through the empty park all the way to the other side. When the landscaped gardens and cobblestone paths came to an end, they kept walking through the sparse shade of the scattered oak trees beyond. When the trees ended and nothing was left but rolling green hills, still they walked. Tails looked back to see how far they were from Quarantine, but Dalziel yanked him forward.  
"How far are we _going?_" Tails pleaded.  
"Every time you whine," Dalziel replied, "Every time you whinge, or mope, or cry, or complain, I'll break one of your bones. And I get to pick which one. You feeling lucky, kid?"  
After about twenty minutes of walking, they finally reached something new. It was a fence. A very tall, wire-mesh fence covered in barbs, and at the top, maybe forty feet up, were loops of razor-wire. A fence that nobody was supposed to get past.  
_Why would anybody be so desperate to leave this place that they would need a fence like this?_ Tails wondered, but the answer came to him almost as soon as he'd asked it. _His father_ had been so desperate, for reasons that still eluded him.  
Dalziel was searching for something, and cursing under his breath. They walked along the length of the fence, and Tails' kidnapper was watching the base of it very closely, breaking every so often to cast a worried glance back toward Quarantine.  
Tails was watching the village, too, hoping that any moment the Armada's military would rush over that hill with loaded weapons. He'd even be happy to see Lieutenant Overdraw, right now.  
Eventually Dalziel found what he was looking for. A spot at the base of the fence where the wire had come apart, making a concealed hole just big enough to squeeze through.  
"There," he said, and with one hard thrust he threw Tails to the ground. "Crawl through it."  
Tails did as he was instructed, grasping at the soft, muddy ground and crawling through the hole. The jagged wire dragged along the back of his suit and he heard it rip, but it didn't matter that much because he figured the mud and grass stains had ruined it anyway. When he reached the other side, he removed the torn jacket and dropped it by the fence. He did the same with his tie, loosening the collar to grant himself a little more comfort. He didn't remove all of his clothes, though - he didn't want to be naked. Even out here, in the wilderness. It was uncouth. _Uncivilised_.  
Even Dalziel dressed himself, albeit his clothing was threadbare and filthy, tattered, falling apart at the seams. He still chose to retain that much dignity. As Tails pondered this, Dalziel was trying to drag himself through the fence-hole, grunting and cursing. It was barely big enough for him, and if not for the fact that he'd clearly squeezed through it once before, Tails would have doubted he could at all. He was about half-way through when his tattered shirt got snagged on the wire, and he got stuck.  
It was now that Tails' stiff legs broke, and before he had time to consider the thought, he turned tail and ran. Dalziel shouted after him, but he had youth on his side, and this was one party he wasn't sticking around for. Whatever this feral intended to do with him, it probably wasn't any more pleasant than the experience had already been so far. Tails put his head down and sprinted toward a copse of trees at the edge of a forest. He was going to be fine. All he had to do was stay hidden, make his way back to Sanctuary, to the Armada and to the warm arms of Badoru Kukku. He would be safe there, he would-  
Tails collided face-first with something so hard that it put his lights out for a moment, threw him upside down and put him on his backside. Stars swarmed through his head. He opened his eyes to see what he'd run into, but his vision was blurred and there was blood in his eyes. He brought his hands to his face, waited for his brain to stop spinning around, and then looked again.  
A massive wolf was staring down at him, snarling. Another feral, but this one appeared much further gone. His pelt was spotted with mange, his eyes were haunting and crazed, and saliva foamed from his mouth as he growled. But he was smiling, too. A sadistic grin. And in his claws he was holding a thick tree branch, with a patch of red on it. Tails brought his hands up to his nose, and found that it was leaking blood like a faucet.  
The wolf dragged him roughly to his feet, and held him in place. Dalziel was storming toward them, murder in his eyes.  
Sometimes, when you know that pain is coming, you can brace yourself for it and it won't be quite as bad as it could be. Tails closed his eyes and tried to do that now.  
"Thanks Dale," Dalziel said, and brought his knee up into Tails' gut.  
Tails, winded for the third time, buckled over in the wolf's grasp and just tried not to throw up. Dalziel grabbed his chin with the talon-hand and lifted his head to see the fox's eyes.  
"We've been through this before," he said, "Maybe you remember, and maybe you don't, but either way, we've been here before. What you need to understand is that we've got no problem with hurting you. This isn't Quarantine, this isn't the hamster cage. There's no rules out here, no mercy or forgiveness, no niceness, no pity. You're back in the wild now, kid. And believe me. It _is_ a jungle out here. So wise up and get used to it." He pulled Tails closer, and spat "_Buckaroo_."

---

**1:23 pm**

It was amazing how much Tails missed the good life after living it for only a day. Fifteen years had rolled by, divided between the streets of Station Square and the Freedom Fighters in the forest, living a nomadic life in between. Nothing had been easy or comfortable about Tails' life, but having been a part of Sanctuary for just one day had changed things. He looked down at the filthy, stained shirt he was wearing and lamented. Sitting on the rocks on the forest floor bothered him in ways it never had before, he couldn't make himself comfortable. There were no cushions, no pillows. The world was so rancid and filled with dirt.  
Badoru Kukku had been right. The world _was_ a pile of crud. The wild lands outside of Babylon were full of hate and bitterness, war and deceit, violence and sadism. People like Nails the Bat, Ivo Robotnik, Dalziel and Dale. Barbaric, uncivilised and filthy. Terra Nullius, a world without soul. Perhaps it would be better if nature's selective hand really did sweep down and purge it all. Prepare a new beginning. Those who were truly worthy, truly _evolved_, could live here in paradise, while the unclean masses choked in a squalour of their own creation.  
Tails tucked the base of his shirt back into his trousers and frowned at his kidnappers, who sat eating like the beasts they were. They were devouring the rotting scraps of some unidentifiable former meal, the loud noise of their chewing and slurping and slobbering and crunching echoing through his skull. His nose throbbed and his head ached. His breathing was shallow from the beating that his gut had endured. He only wanted to go back home to Sanctuary.  
"Hungry?" Dalziel snarled.  
"No," Tails replied, bitterly. With his nose busted, the word came out: _Doh._  
"Yeah, well good. You're not getting any."  
"Who are you people? What do you want with me?"  
"Didn't I tell you no whining?"  
Tails' lower lip trembled and he hugged his knees. But a part of him went through a transformation, there and then. Fifteen years, the filthy world's punching bag. He'd been a victim through all of his life, a hollow shell to beat with a stick until he cracked. Nails' little puppet, turned Freedom Fighter for a cause he had no real attachment to, and now beaten and tortured for no real reason by a couple of feral mutants. Whenever anybody loomed over him with a fist or a finger or a gun cocked, stared down at him and told him to be silent, be still, do this or do that, his lower lip had trembled, he'd hugged his knees, and he'd said he was sorry. He always backed down, shrank away from pain, allowed himself to be used and abused at the leisure of any scoundrel or beast who saw fit to have their way with him.  
But not anymore. It was at this moment that Tails decided he was done being the victim. He was better than these people. He'd evolved. There was no excuse in allowing them to break him down, _he_ was the superior one, _he_ had inherited authority over the beasts of the world, _he_ was so far above them that _he_ trampled them under his feet. They hated because they _feared_ and because they _envied_. He only took their abuse because he allowed it.  
"Do it," he spat.  
Dalziel stopped chewing and looked up at him. With a mouth full of food, he said "_Excuse_ me?"  
"Go ahead," Tails said, louder. "_Beat_ me. If you think that you can put me through any worse pain than I'm already in, then let's see you try it. Thrash me to death. Whatever you think that will prove, or if you just get a natural _thrill_ out of it, be my guest. I _deserve_ to know what you intend to do with me, why you've dragged me out here and decided to beat the stuffing out of me, you cowardly, filthy, _failures at life_."  
For a moment, the silence hung heavy through the forest, and Tails expected that the two ferals would just march over to him and pummel him with rocks until he resembled raw chicken stuffing. At least that would end this, and he would die having stood up for himself. He was so sick of this forsaken life that it would be somewhat of a blessing to just end it on a relative high note.  
But Dalziel just snorted and went back to eating. "Where'd you get so cocky, retard?"  
"You can stop calling me that," Tails said. But really, the insult just rolled off his back, now that he knew his unusual traits actually set him above these people rather than below.  
"Sure, retard," Dalziel replied, smiled, and then resumed eating loudly. Tails figured this was the end of a short and pointless conversation, so he lay back on the rocks to rest his newly re-injured body. But then Dalziel began to speak again.  
"They promised us reincorporation."  
"What did you say?" Tails asked, raising his head.  
"Reincorporation, means they said they were gonna toss us back into the hamster cage. All we had to do was deliver you to them. Something about you really took their fancy, you see. But they lied. We took you right to them, didn't even beat you up too bad, and they didn't give us a thing. Didn't even thank us. Shoulda known they'd never let us back inside. Bad genes and all."  
"I don't remember this," Tails said.  
"Of course you don't, you had a problem with your noggin. Seems to be all fixed up now, though. I guess I hit you hard enough that it fixed you good and proper. Amazing, you can fix anything if you give it a good whack."  
"None of this explains why you're doing this to me."  
Dalziel laughed. "What are you, completely brain-dead? Cause and effect, kid. They broke their end of the bargain, so we're breaking ours. Tit for tat. Karma."  
"We're on an island, you know. Not a very big one, either. They _will_ find me."  
Dalziel took another bite of his rotting meal. "If they come, then we'll kill you. Make them watch."  
"Then they might kill _you_."  
"So _what_? Let them! Take a look around, have a good look. Life _stinks_. How bad do you think we wanna hang around here every day eating garbage for breakfast, lunch and dinner? At least we'll die knowing that we got our own back, that we'd shown an Armada brat what life is really like out here. It'll be good to die knowing we struck a blow against them, make them know the pain of watching someone kill _their_ family."  
How morbid, the barbarian's desire to hurt, to maim and to kill, at any and all costs. He remembered the thrall of the criminal life, how it had captured his father, and how Trevor had reconciled his lifestyle, silenced his moral objections, by reminding himself that those who lived more privelaged lives were evil, and deserved to be robbed, to be hurt. A mentality that Tails now recognised as flawed and poisonous.  
"That's revolting," Tails spat, "The only thing you think about is how you can best hurt someone. How can you be so cruel? Because your life isn't as comfortable as theirs? They're good people, why can't you just leave them alone?"  
Dalziel and Dale both laughed at this, his reprimand just a big joke to them.  
"Oh man," Dalziel snorted, "You really _do_ sound like one of them. An exile who talks like a hamster. Let me tell you, kid, that never lasts long. You break outta that mindset pretty quick."  
"What mindset? Common sense? Peacemongering?"  
"You know what? I think you ought to come with me. There's something you should see."  
"Why should I go anywhere with you? What could you possibly show me that I'll give a darn about?"  
"Easy there, retard. I'm just gonna give you an education, that's all. Who's the Bad Guy, one-oh-one. I'm not saying you'll give a darn, but if you really want to know where we're coming from on this, then here's your chance to find out."  
Tails figured that it couldn't hurt. At least they weren't beating him anymore. So he went with Dalziel, who led him through the forest to a cliff that overlooked the valley where Quarantine lay. He pointed to the village, an oasis in an otherwise unspoiled wilderness. From here they could see the little town and its surrounding parkland, encapsulated within a wide wire fence, all lying at the base of the twin towers of Sanctuary. The white towers, one taller than the other, were cylindrical and very thin, but the shortest was perhaps a hundred storeys tall, the other another fifty. Kukku was right, they took up very little room but had an awful lot of space - if you could fly.  
"Take a look at your _good people_," Dalziel spat, "Take a good, hard look."  
"All I see is a village. A peaceful little village where nobody fights or hurts each other, and where everybody has everything they could ever want."  
"You really are an idiot," the feral said, "Don't look at them. Look at _them_!"  
Tails followed his gaze downward, beyond the white spires of Sanctuary and the rose-gardens of the village below; beyond the razor fence that gave Quarantine its name.  
There were people milling about outside the fence. More ferals. They were scrounging, foraging for garbage, like animals, grazing. There was a marked difference between these people and the residents on the other side of the wire. None of these people looked healthy, none of them content. If Quarantine was the height of civilisation, as the Armada defined it, then these people lived on the exact opposite side of the spectrum. Two mobians, Tails saw, were fighting over a scrap, and they barked and snarled at each other like rabid wolves. There were perhaps half a dozen of the pitiful creatures.  
"Who are they?" Tails asked.  
"They're us," Dalziel replied, "We're the exiles. We're what happens when someone pees in the gene pool. And why do you think _we_ don't get to live in paradise with the rest of the dumb old hamsters?"  
"You're too wild," Tails replied, "Too uncivilised. Look at that, they're so feral, almost zoic. Unrestrained violence. You'd just make it like the rest of the world."  
"Wow, quick answer. That sounded almost rehearsed. Just like an Armada-trained seal. Can you jump through hoops, too? How about you just shut up and pay attention."  
"I'm listening."  
"We're _all_ born animals. It's no different for you or me or any of the people in that cage. You don't get thrown out of Quarantine because you're too wild, you get thrown out because of _this_." He held up his right arm, the thin, gnarled talon. "Don't buy into their propaganda, kid, don't think that they're infallable. They make mistakes, a _lot_ of mistakes. We're the mistakes."  
Tails squinted to see the exiles more clearly. Indeed, they weren't just unhealthy. Beneath the tattered clothes, the filth and the mange, these mobians were all malformed. Too many limbs or too few, heads too big for their bodies, legs too short or too crooked, eyes too close together or too far apart. The people of Quarantine looked strange for their physical traits, but they weren't typically so unusual that you would call them _deformed_. These poor souls, on the other hand, had been dealt a very bad hand at birth.  
"They like to keep the gene pool clean inside the cage," Dalziel said, "Don't want anyone polluting their little experiment. That's why, if you're born a little weird, you got too many arms or one eye or tentacles, you get marked for removal. No appeal, no argument, just a one way ticket to foraging garbage for the rest of whatever life they allow you to have. It don't matter who you are. You know my mate Dale, back there? You know who his father is? Alain Bristol, their supposed leader, that's who. Dale Bristol, that was his name. Just Dale, now. It don't matter _who_ you are." He turned to Tails, the gleam of hatred and madness in his eyes. "Don't you see? _They made us this way_. They banish us, then punish us, for the way we look. Now that you're one of us, tell me what you think of your beloved Armada."  
Tails watched the pitiful, deformed people at the base of the hill make themselves into beasts, fighting over scraps of rotting garbage with their hooked postures, clawed hands and horrid growths, and suddenly everything clicked into place for him. His father's fear, his quest and promise. Badoru Kukku's words ran through his head again:  
_It is not impossible to have a child in Quarantine without our knowledge, despite what most of my colleagues would attest. Nature found a way, it seems. The miracle is that we did not even know that you existed until you came back to us._  
He had been a part of the Armada's project to breed a higher evolution of mobian, but he hadn't been expected. His father would have known about the policy of removing those who displayed defective traits. He and Tails' mother would have good reason to fear that their child would be marked for exile. And of course, when the child had been born, with two tails hooked to his rear end...  
"Don't get all narky because I'm calling you names," Dalziel said with a wry grin, "I don't mean anything _nasty_ by it. You see... we're _all_ retards here, Tails. Every one of us. Welcome to the family."

---

**2:15 pm**

"Have fun?" growled Dale, the feral wolf, with a smirk on his face. Tails didn't reply, he just sat on the rocks and held his nose with his eyes closed. It had started bleeding again, staining a red racing strip down the centre of his shirt.  
"We had an enlightening little chat regarding the nature of his life from now until forever," Dalziel said, "Taught him a thing or two about his heroes up in the tower. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but he would'a figured it all out pretty soon anyway."  
Tails sighed. It seemed that Babylon wasn't quite a paradise after all. At least not for those who the Armada deemed to be genetically inferior. If Dalziel's story could be trusted, then Kukku and his scientists' hospitality extended only toward the people who fit a set genetic criteria. It made a kind of sense even still; it fit with the same theory of evolution that Kukku had espoused, that the genetically superior mobians would naturally rise up while the weaker ones would be swept under the rug. But Tails hadn't seen the coldness of the theory until now, hadn't seen the real unemotive science behind what was being done. He only saw warmth in these people, kindness and affability. But here was the other side of the story. Here was what _his father_ had seen, that which he himself had been blind to.  
"It's called _eugenics_, if you're wondering," Dalziel muttered.  
Tails lifted his head again. "Hm?"  
"Eugenics. My Pop taught me that, before I was exiled. They gave us a lot of books in the hamster cage, and he made good use of them. He told me it's basically like maintaining a swimming pool. You pour in the chemicals, keep the water clean, scoop out all the leaves and the other muck that forms on top of the water. At least, that's the way _they_ see it. I guess it makes sense if you believe a person can be garbage to be scooped out."  
The Armada were breeding a super-race of evolved mobians, but only according to their patented definition of evolution. For the others, those who didn't fit the mould, they were forced to endure horrifying disfigurements, foraging for food scraps, as the Armada didn't want to waste any resources maintaining these genetic failures.  
Their society may have been paradise, but it was also cold, sterile and soulless. Science without empathy.  
"Why do you call them hamsters?" Tails asked.  
Dalziel snorted. "Hamsters. Guinea pigs. Lab rats. Take your pick. You know, they built that fence to keep _us_ out, but it's also there to keep _them_ in. It's a cage. They should put a great big plastic _wheel_ right in the middle to complete the picture."  
"But you want to get back in."  
"'Course we do. Know why? 'Cause it feels _good_ to beat the system. Law of nature, survival of the fittest. Don't you think that we're all just a big happy family out here, we exiles, 'cause we're not. _Survival_ of the _fittest_. I'd step over the corpse of every single one of these losers for another chance at the cage. In the _cage_, there's food. Shelter. Clean water. Protection. _Ladies_." On that last note, he and Dale grinned at each other.  
Tails saw now how his father slipped so easily into a hatred of the rich. He'd come to see them in the same light as the Armada. A system that privelaged a few while remaining apathetic about those who didn't fit a criteria. In Station Square, the criteria was financial rather than genetic, but the results were the same. Like these exiles, Trevor had hated the elite - but would have given just about anything to be a part of it.  
No honour among theives - or exiles.  
Tails looked over the pitiful beings who had snatched him, confused about how to feel about them. It was easier to think of them as scum, brutes whose life away from society had whittled their souls to dust, but it seemed that the story was more complicated, the situation more complex. They had kidnapped him, beaten him senseless, broken his nose, openly admitted that they intended to kill him for revenge against another enemy. He did not have the friendship or allegience of these people. But the Armada... what of them? Something was far from right about their activities on this island. Tails was growing disillusioned about their nobility, though until now he'd been enraptured with the idea of genetic and social betterment, what Kukku had called _evolution_ and Dalziel had called _eugenics_. This was not a utopia after all - perfection came with a price, and somebody had to pay it.  
Dalziel, such a hateful creature, haggard and malnourished, crude and violent, didn't seem much more empathetic to anyone than the Armada were toward him and the other exiles, but then again, the former had been sired and raised by the latter. Tails didn't know much about Dale, the other, for the wolf spoke and did very little, but he imagined they shared the same worldview and mentality. There was nobody here to teach him what to believe, how to think. All that was left for Tails was to return to the mystery that was his father - try to figure out his reasons, and what exactly he had promised, and to whom.  
"My mother," he said, "I've been looking for my mother. You used to live in Quarantine, right? Would you know anything about-"  
"_Mother_," Dalziel spat, "Good luck with that, she's probably dead."  
Tails frowned. "How could you possibly know that? You just made that up."  
"Maybe I did, retard! Just to make you feel even more like crap. It's _funny_ to me. But, then again, maybe I didn't!"  
"Forget I said anything," Tails said, shaking his head.  
"Why, do you miss your Mummy? Wish she was here to tuck you in, patch you up, take you away from these nasty bullies? Losing Mummy just happens to be a fact of life around here... _and_ in there."  
"Oh yeah?" Tails growled, losing patience with the smug kidnappers who seemed to enjoy his pain so much, "And why is that?"  
"Think about it, kid. Think with your head, not your butt. Do you see any _women_ in exile?"  
"I don't know, I haven't been here that long."  
"Well there ain't. Chicks don't _get_ exiled. Know why? 'Cause they breed. They don't want that. They don't want a bunch of retards and rejects out here having kids and screwing up paradise. If you're a chick and you get tagged, they don't send you out here. They send you down a long tunnel with a bright light at the end of it."  
Tails stared at him for a long time, trying to work out if Dalziel was lying just to cause him pain.  
"The chicks, they're the core of the project," Dalziel said, "They're what make the whole thing work, what keeps the big plastic wheel spinning in the hamster cage. The birds, they tag 'em like dairy cows. Got tracking devices in 'em, so the birds know exactly where they are, who they're with, and if, heaven forbid, they ever get out of the cage. Gotta keep _strict_ checks on the women. Keep an eye on them, especially when they start having kids. A mother who gives birth to rejects is bad news. Means there's something wrong with her. They got no use for someone who keeps spitting out kids with too many bits and pieces. They have a word for it, they call it _corrupted_. That's a breeder that produces bad stock. _Corrupted_. Polluting the gene pool. Gotta get rid of it. Gotta _remove_ it."  
Tails didn't want to hear any more, but he had to. The horror of this was inconceivable, he imagined dozens of women, _kids' mothers_, being lined up outside a killing pen designed for cattle. The children being taken away and the mothers _removed_ for the crime of inferior genetics. But there was more, an even greater horror building in Tails' mind, a terrible realisation.  
"You said they're tagged. What did you mean, like with computers? They can trace them?"  
Dalziel grinned again and nodded. "Yep."  
"They know _exactly_ where all the women are?"  
"All part of the grand plan, kid."  
That was the answer to everything. Tails' father, his escape from the island and his promise to return. One mobian's desperate effort to save his family, the agonizing decisions he had to make. Tails trembled, held his head in both hands just to stop them from shaking. This was too much to bear.  
"If you're out here," Dalziel said, "then your mother is probably dead. _Corrupted_. Removed. Like I said, fact of life out here. Mine's dead, Dale's is dead, and yours too."

---

**3:35 pm**

It was nothing more than luck that Tails noticed the face sticking out of the dirt.  
For an hour he sat in the exiles' camp, lamenting about all that he had learned today. He knew now why the Armada had been his father's enemy, and hated himself for having been seduced by their philosophy. He'd lived in their tower, spoken to them, walked through the grounds of Quarantine and viewed the results of their project first hand, and yet he hadn't seen it. He'd been in the belly but couldn't see the beast. As Sonic might have said, he couldn't see the forest for the trees.  
He'd had to spend some time out here, in the dirt with a broken nose, to see it. Because, up until now, he'd been seeing it through _their_ eyes.  
The face was staring up at him without expression, and Tails had been looking at it for quite a while before he actually noticed it. Something buried with the rest of the junk in this makeshift campsite, something Dale and Dalziel had found and brought back here, probably only to decide it was useless and discard it. The face of a doll or a little statue. It was caked with dirt and half-buried. Tails might have left it there to rot, if not for the strange sensation that he'd seen it before.  
(And why not? You knew these other guys, the moment you saw them. Knew their names, even before they told them to you. You've got a lot of lost time to account for, buckaroo.)  
He leaned over to dig the thing out. It was some kind of toy, perhaps, or a model. Something made of metal that looked like a little gold pig, with a key sticking out of the back of it. His mind throbbed with familiarity, he knew the contours of it, the weight of it. Like Déjà vu, but ongoing. It urged him to reach for the key on the back of the thing, to give it a few hard twists.  
"Come on," Dalziel said, "We're moving."  
Tails took his hand off the key and pocketed the toy. Though he couldn't imagine what good it would be to him, he couldn't stand to leave it behind. Perhaps later it would help him to remember something.  
"Where are we going?"  
"We're _going!_" Dalziel barked, "You gonna co-operate, or are we gonna have to beat some more of the stuffing out of you?" He seemed anxious for some reason, as though something was making him feel uneasy. He was craning his neck to see the sky. So Tails followed, figuring Dalziel would just find something else to break if he didn't.  
"Hurry up," the feral fox was urging, "I heard them. They know we're here, we have to-"  
If Tails' hearing was any more astute then he might have heard a sound behind him, a quiet thump like something of little mass dropping softly in the leaves. As it was, nobody did hear it. Nobody knew anything until it was on them.  
It happened very quickly. Tails was grabbed roughly by one of his tails and yanked backward, so hard that he fell onto his back and rolled. Somebody screamed "_Halt!_", then there was a horrid snarl and the shriek of attack. Tails dragged himself back to his feet, in time to see a fierce skirmish. Dale was mauling somebody. His victim was shrieking and flailing as they rolled together, locked in battle. Then there was a loud _zap_, like an electrical discharge, and Tails smelled the scent of something burning in the air. Dale yelped like a wounded animal, and Tails realised he wasn't attacking anymore, but _spasming_. The massive wolf fled from the battle, with a limp, and kept running until he was out of sight.  
The other fighter rose to his feet like a great black shadow lifting off the ground and becoming whole. A dark cape that wasn't a cape flapped in the air.  
Lieutenant Overdraw folded his mighty wings, craned his neck and turned toward Tails.  
But then he was grabbed again from behind, a strong arm wrapping around his waist and another around his neck, and Tails saw to his horror that the hand near his neck was holding a knife to it.  
"_Don't you come any closer or I'll do it I swear!_" Dalziel's voice barked.  
"Exiles," Overdraw hissed, his voice dripping with contempt, "Beasts. _Animals_. Put down the knife, yes? Put down your primitive little tool. There is no _contest_ here."  
"I'll kill him," Dalziel said, and Tails was afraid that he was entirely sincere. Hadn't he said earlier that he would do it if he was cornered? He'd slash Tails open and face the consequences gladly. Tails squirmed, his heart thudding heavy in his chest.  
Overdraw stood a few feet ahead, his eyes flitting between Tails and his captor, entirely unconcerned. "Oh please," he said, "That is a threat, yes? I am not bothered. In fact, I urge you to do it, yes. He has been a problem for me, this one. Why would you think that I care about the fate of this... animal?"  
"You don't care about anything," Dalziel growled, "Any_body_. You send us all out here to _rot_."  
"And rot is what you shall do, yes? The sooner, the better." Overdraw lifted a gun and aimed it, showing no sign of concern that he might hit the wrong target. Tails' anxiety increased as he wondered which one of them was the _right_ target.  
"I _will_ shoot through him to hit you, yes."  
Tails squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the shot, but somebody grabbed Dalziel's arm away from him. He leaped away as soon as he was able, and turned to see that there were a full dozen of the military agents here, and several of them were wrestling with the screaming and cursing exile. Tails rubbed his neck in the place where the knife would have slashed it apart, and gulped. "_Thank you_."  
"Thank me?" Overdraw asked. "You worm. You deserve nothing."  
Tails looked up at the dark-clad Lieutenant, and found that the gun was still cocked. Overdraw was pointing it at his head.  
"What- what are you-"  
"Funny that we should find you wallowing in the filth with the rest of these animals, yes?" Overdraw said, "You can train a beast to sit at a table and dress in mobian clothes, yes, but you can not make him a person. Sooner or later he will run away to be with the rest of his kind. Roll in the filth _together_."  
"_I didn't run away!_" Tails shrieked, "_These people kidnapped me! Do you see my nose? Do you?_" His injury made the word come out sounding like _doze_.  
"Yes, yes, yes," Overdraw said, clearly his favourite word, "But they can _smell_ their own kind, yes? They _know_ an animal. _I_ know an animal. But some, they do not, yes? Some, they think that if you flap your ears or spin your tails and fly like a real person, then you _are_ a real person. It is a madness, yes? An infatuation with a fantasy. I am sick of hearing it, sick of smelling your _stench_ through the towers of Sanctuary. Turning our paradise into a _zoo_. You are a curiosity, a biological marvel, _nothing more_. Yes."  
"So what, you're just going to _shoot_ me? What's Kukku going to think about that?"  
Overdraw smirked. "We were sent to recover you, yes. From the clutches of these... beasts. But if the beasts were to kill you first, then what am I to do about that? The killing blow could be his or mine, but who would tell the difference, yes?"  
"Your scientists can build chromosomes out of dead matter, I think it's likely they'd know a bullet from the Lieutenant's gun when they saw it," Tails said.  
"Interesting. The talking beast can reason, yes? And if I were to pick up a rock instead? Beat you with it like an animal would? What then, talking beast?"  
"Then I guess you'd prove what a big brave bird you are, beating a dumb harmless animal to death with a rock."  
Overdraw frowned, and Tails wondered if he really would. But the bird smiled again, and lowered the gun. "Maybe some day you will get yourself stuck out here again, yes? And you will stay out here. Eating insects and bathing in dirt. As you should."  
Tails became aware of an audible whirring that seemed to bathe the entire forest in sound. He hadn't a clue what it could have been, but it seemed to drive Dalziel crazy. He roared and gnashed his jaws, thrashed his limbs as four black-uniformed soldiers tried to hold him down.  
"_Kill me!_" he shrieked, "_Just kill me, you cowards! End this here!_"  
"Why should we want to do that, yes?" Overdraw asked, "There are so many more possibilities for a specimen such as yourself in Babylon. Oh yes, possibilities _abound_."  
The whirring seemed to come from above, and Tails looked up to discern what it was. It was the kind of sound that resonated in a person's bones, made the entire body vibrate at its core. What he saw swimming in the air above, the thing that made such a sound, didn't make any sense to him. Not only did it not resemble any kind of machine he'd ever seen before, but he couldn't even figure out whether it was alive.  
What descended from above was something vaguely resembling an ocean squid, except that it was black and had far too many tentacles. And, of course, it was in the sky rather than the water. The beast or machine or whatever it was spun in a clockwise circle with dozens of tendril-like appendages swimming around it. The body of the thing was an enormous bulb, upon which five bright strobe lights were arranged in a pentagon, mounted on a seperate disc that spun in the opposite direction to the rest of the contraption. As it descended, the tentacles shredded the canopy, forming a neat hole in the trees through which it passed. Tails feared what would happen when it reached him, but Lieutenant Overdraw didn't seem concerned. In fact, this all seemed like routine to him. To Tails, it was like witnessing a UFO.  
When the machine or monster or whatever it was dropped to a height of around six feet above their heads, emitting a whirr that Tails thought would rip him to shreds and a gale from its spinning tentacles like the wind from a helicopter's rotor blades, it stopped and hovered there. Tails had to shield his eyes from the lights. Dalziel was screaming and thrashing harder than ever.  
Overdraw said something, but Tails didn't hear it. The monster-machine's lights faded and the dome split open like a flower in bloom, its petals expanding outward until it blocked out the sun, and the thing began to descend again, dropping down like the mouth of a hungry beast.

---

_Tails liked life with his father, but that life began to go downhill the day his father cried.  
It was the one and only time that Tails had ever seen it happen, and the impact on him was immense. He himself cried lots of times, of course, being a child, but he thought his father beyond such displays of emotion. His father was a pillar of strength, a superhero, immortal. When that broke down, Tails' sense of security shattered beneath him like a mountain washed into the sea.  
It happened one day when Trevor was at work and Tails was sitting in the car as usual, reading a flight manual that he'd found in the garbage outside the airport. By this time he knew about as much about planes as anybody, though he'd never really been close to one. He read that manual over and over again, until he just about knew it word for word.  
He'd been reading so intently that he was startled when his father opened the car door and collapsed in the driver's seat. He'd been away for quite a while, maybe an hour, one of his longer jobs, doing whatever he did inside a rather homely looking suburban house. Now he just sat and stared out the windscreen. Tails thought he'd seen something that caught his interest, but all he could see out there was the road. A row of houses with rusty wire fences and neatly trimmed green lawns. A sprinkler, going _hiss-hiss-hiss-hiss_.  
"Dad?" Tails asked.  
Trevor said nothing. He looked tired. In fact, he looked weary, exhausted. He slammed the car door closed, silencing that sprinkler, and just sat and stared.  
It was then that Tails noticed something amiss. His father's clothes were ruffled. And they were stained red.  
"Dad?" he tried again.  
Trevor lifted his hands and turned his palms upward, and just stared down at them. Tails could see that they were covered in red. He didn't want to believe it was what it looked like.  
"Dad, what happened?"  
His father still didn't reply, but his face broke. It just shrivelled up, as though somebody had clamped his hand in a vise. He pounded fiercely on the steering wheel for a moment, and then planted his face on top of it and cried.  
Tails never learned what exactly his father did when he visited those houses, apartments, docks, warehouses, shops. But whatever he did, whatever his job entailed, it broke him the day he came back to the car covered in blood. What truly frightened Tails was the fact that the blood clearly was not his own.  
That was the last time Trevor took his son to work with him. From that moment onward, Tails stayed in the old church where Nails and his gang operated. He became much better acquainted with the characters who came here to help the bat handle his business. Like suave, sophisticated Floyd Tabs, the grinning sphinx, who knew how to do magic with playing cards. And the foul-mouthed but outrageously hilarious Carson Crow, who entertained him with excellent impressions of famous people. Once, after a news interview about a shuttle launch in Mobitropolis, Carson held a handful of broom bristles to his beak and did an impression of the Science Minister so good that it had Tails rolling on the floor in hysterics.  
But most of all, he liked Nails. The bat in the pinstripe suit knew that Tails had sworn an oath to his father, but it wasn't long before he had the boy talking. He was, after all, very good at breaking people. Always a master manipulator. He treated Tails to a lot of things his father never let him do - like the time he offered Tails a puff of that thick brown tube he was always sucking on. The smoke tasted good, except the time he inhaled accidentally and went into a coughing fit, much to Nails' amusement.  
Nails began to speak to him about his future, and if he would like to follow in his father's footsteps. His Dad did some very important work, he said, and he was very good at what he did, but Tails would be even better. Because Tails was a little rocket. He had skills that most other people didn't have. He appealed to the boy's sense of importance - after all, his tails had made him feel like a freak. Nails didn't make him feel like that. With Nails, he felt like his tails made him something special, something powerful.  
After all, he and Nails shared a bond. They both knew what it meant to be able to fly. And that, in some way, made them kindred.  
It was about a month after Trevor returned to the car with blood on his hands that he woke Tails up in the middle of the night. The boy sat up in bed to listen to the silhouette of his father whisper to him.  
Trevor asked him if he remembered Tyler.  
Tails only vaguely remembered his Uncle Tyler. He was very young the last time he saw him. Uncle Tyler was a lot of fun, but he couldn't live with them for some reason he couldn't remember, or never knew.  
His father told him now that Tyler was coming back. And, a couple of nights from now, they were both going to meet with him, and the three of them would go away together. Away from this place, far away. They were going to have a better life, the life they had always wanted. But he wasn't allowed to tell anybody. Anybody at all.  
Tails was sad to know that he was going to leave his newest friends, and asked why he wasn't allowed to say goodbye. His father simply said that he just wasn't, and made him promise, which he did.  
It was somewhat sad, yes, but exciting also. Because his father had always promised him that this day would come, that they would go away together and travel. See the world. Live.  
Trevor told his son he loved him, and Tails returned the sentiment. They hugged, and Trevor's silhouette stood up and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.  
Tails, grinning, rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. He knew he wouldn't be able to, however. He was too excited, thinking about the adventures that the three of them were going to have together. Life was going to be great, from now on. Life was going to be just _peachy_.  
Tails never saw his father again._

---

**5:15 pm**

The tropical garden at the top of Sanctuary's highest tower had filled Tails' head with the most beautiful scents, the first time he had woken up here. This time he smelled nothing, his snout encapsulated inside some kind of thick glove, splinted and padded and soaked in something. His nose tingled constantly as though he needed to sneeze, but he never did, couldn't even when he tried.  
Badoru Kukku was dressing a wound on his forehead with some kind of stinging disinfectant when Tails awoke, and the bird appeared glum, sighing and shaking his head.  
"Those wretched exiles," he muttered, "I am so sorry, Tails. So, so sorry."  
Tails tried to speak but found that there was nothing he could say. The warmth of the mobian who he had recently come to think of as a kind of surrogate father was romantic and alluring, but there were more issues to consider now.  
Had Badoru Kukku killed Tails' mother?  
"The treatment we have given you will rebuild the cartilage in your nose," Kukku said, and then after a pause, "So fragile. You know that we can build a beak for you. Just say the word, my boy. We have the technology to upgrade your body as though it were a machine. Organ donations are unnecessary in Babylon, we can grow anything from nothing. We only need a sample, just a drop of blood, a flake of skin."  
Tails imagined himself with a beak, but couldn't crack a smile. There was something more morbid than comical about it. Walking around this citadel of science and death wearing a beak like a mask. One final betrayal against his father, wearing the symbol of the enemy on his face, covering up the snout that people had told him gave him the spitting image of Trevor Prower.  
"Thank goodness you thought to drop your jacket by the fence," Kukku said, "Or else we may never have found the hole that horrid beast slipped through. Such a _smart_ boy. Thanks to you, nobody else need be concerned about those from the outside infecting our paradise."  
_No problem_, Tails thought, knowing that he hadn't actually dropped his jacket for that purpose at all, but he'd never corrected anybody who had mistakenly overestimated his intelligence. That was something he had learned from Sonic - what most called ego, but Sonic had preferred to call it _a healthy dose of pride_.  
"I just feel... _terrible_," the bird said, "I fear your trust in me may have been wounded by this experience, but I assure you... we never take advantage of the lessons that we learn. Every mistake is a lesson, and we never make the same mistake twice, Tails." He shook his head. "Now you see the truth in what I have told you. The world outside these walls is a brutal one, full of such unrestrained hate and violence."  
_The world within these walls seems not much better_, Tails thought.  
Kukku smiled. "Experiences like these, they only strengthen my resolve, you know. More than ever I dream of a world where beasts like that do not exist, and where we can all live in safety."  
_But what of beasts like you?_ Tails wondered, _Who would really be safe then?_

---

**6:32 pm**

Sonic the Hedgehog had sought to liberate Tails from a life from which, at first, he did not believe he needed to be liberated. Nails the Bat was a harsh master, but he kept Tails alive, and that was something he knew he could count on, if only because it hadn't been in Nails' interest to get rid of him. He couldn't have made the same guarantee about Sonic and the dangerous, insecure alternative he offered. And Tails had seen nothing wrong with his lifestyle, after all. Because the forest always was so much harder to see with all those trees in the way.  
Now Tails found himself in the position that Sonic had been in, all those years ago. He looked into Cremaria Kukku's wide, hazel eyes as the rabbit stared back into his, and he knew that she would never believe that there was anything untoward about the Armada's project. At least not if he, an interloper from the wild lands of Terra Nullius, was the one trying to convince her. Still, he had to try... didn't he? Was it not his responsibility, his moral obligation, to save this girl from the life that she was being raised into?  
The children sat together in Tails' room in the tower, Tails healing in his bandages and Cream with dire concern written into her face. She looked over the bandages and held his hand tenderly.  
"I cannot believe this has happened," she said, "The exiles are such beasts, I do not know why Father doesn't just drive away the lot of them. I'm very glad that you are safe now!"  
"Cream," he said, "There's something I need to speak to you about. Some questions I need to ask you." He hesitated, then added "You're not going to like it very much."  
"Of course. Anything."  
"Well, I..."  
Tails tried to figure out where he was going to begin. He wasn't even sure how much of Kukku's eugenics program she was intimately familiar with. Did she know how they selected those who were worthy to live in Quarantine? Did she know what was done to those who weren't? As he struggled with his words, he became aware of an uncomfortable bulge in his pocket. He fished around with his hand and pulled out something familiar - the dirty little statuette he'd picked up in the forest. A piece of junk. He had no idea why he'd kept it.  
Cream's reaction to it, though, was shocking. Her eyes locked on it like a child whose parents just offered her an ice cream. Her hands flew to her cheeks and her jaw dropped. Tails wondered for a second whether what he held was some kind of bomb.  
"_You found him!_" Cream just about screamed.  
"I found what?"  
She pointed at the toy. "It's _Tock!_ You found _Tock!_"  
(_Officially I'm known as Forty-Seven-K, but a good friend of mine always called me Tock. You can too!_)  
"Why is that familiar?" Tails asked, "I know this, somehow. I've seen this before. What is it?"  
"Turn the key!" Cream exclaimed, "Turn the key and wind him up!"  
Tails clutched the little key tentatively, as though turning it might make the little thing come alive and bite his fingers off. Somehow he knew it wasn't dangerous, but his fear was inherent in the fact that he didn't know why he knew the things he did.  
Cautiously, he gave the key a few good cranks, then set the contraption down on the floor. He wasn't sure that the thing would even work, considering the state it was in when he found it, but lo and behold, the little key started to turn of its own accord, with a quiet ticking. The toy's lightbulb eyes flickered and then lit up, it snapped its hinged jaw a few times, and clambered in a tiny circle on its stubby little legs. Then, to Tails' surprise, it spoke in a tinny high-pitched voice.  
"Remote Robot serial forty-seven-k reporting," it said, "_Whoooooo!_ Feels good to be back, I can tell you that! Checking internal systems, please hold... status report: internal systems are _crap_. All systems therefore normal."  
"_Tock!_" Cream exclaimed.  
The tiny robot turned around, hobbling on its little metal legs, and looked up at her. Its eyes flickered, blinked on and off, and it seemed to wobble around with excitement, or at least it displayed this as well as it was able.  
"_Creampie!_"  
The robot leaped into her lap, and she laughed in glee. Tails was taken aback, if not just a little alarmed. _Creampie?_ Oh, good lord.  
"_Buckaroo!_" the robot exclaimed, and Tails realised it was referring to him. With a metallic clatter, its legs retracted into its body, and something poked out of the top at the same time. This revealed itself to be a tiny set of rotor blades, which immediately began spinning like crazy, and the robot launched itself out of Cream's lap and started buzzing about his head like an enormous beetle.  
"I'm glad you're here!" it announced, "I have a message for you! An _urgent_ message! Now, if only I could remember what it was. _Oh yes!_ Buckaroo! You've gotta be careful, those two guys you're hanging out with are bad news! They're leading you into an ambush! They want the reward for your- Wait a second. Where the heck _am_ I?"  
"I _do_ remember you," Tails realised, "Tock... We've met before. You helped me."  
"That's all I've been trying to do!" it replied, "You help me and I'll help you! You've been winding down, good buddy."  
"I don't wind down anymore. I got that fixed."  
"Well, that makes one of us! _Ha-ha!_"  
"But wait... you two know each other?"  
Tails had never seen Cream smiling so much. Her premature adulthood stripped away instantly by just one dirty little toy.  
"Oh, me and Creampie go _way_ back, _way_ back," Tock the robot said.  
"He was my best friend," Cream added, "When there was nobody else like me and life was lonely, Tock would be there to cheer me up. Oh, _Tails_! You tricked me!"  
"I did?"  
"Yes, when you said you had something I wasn't going to like. This is the best present anyone has ever... Oh Tails, _thank you!_" Cream leaped up and wrapped her arms around him in a hug. Taken by surprise, Tails returned the embrace somewhat hesitantly. He realised that, curiously, she was also hugging him with her ears. The huge winglike appendages warmed him like a blanket.  
"Right," he said, and forced a laugh. "I got you good." He figured that the reunion between the girl and her lost friend was probably not the best time to bring up the subject of violence and matricide. Looking at her now, Tails could believe that this was the happiest she had been in a long time.  
Happiness, it seemed, _real_ happiness, was a rare thing in paradise. In the absence of pain, a person is wont to forget exactly what pleasure is.

---

**9:20 pm**

Sleep did not come easy to Tails, that night.  
The itching of his face as his nose repaired itself under the bandages was one thing, but the itching in his mind was leagues worse. So many people wanted him to believe so many different things, but the truth always eluded him, so much so that he didn't know _who_ he could trust.  
_You could trust Sonic, if he were here,_ his mind told him, _None of these people you know from a bar of soap, but Sonic would have the answers._  
But Sonic _wasn't_ here. He could be anywhere or nowhere, but he wasn't here. Still, though his common sense told him that Sonic was dead and gone, what he had realised over the course of his time on the Kitsune Atole was that he'd never really lost faith that Sonic was alive somewhere. That faith was always there, in the back of his mind. He could crap in one hand and wish in the other and no matter which hand filled up first, he believed Sonic to be alive out there _somewhere_. Nuts to you, Nails.  
Hope, faith, wishful thinking or blind optimism though it may have been, Tails closed his eyes and offered a prayer to his missing friend, somewhere out there, over the ocean and far away. Whatever he was doing, it must have been important. Though he wished that he was there to help Sonic through his hard times, he assured the hedgehog that his own task was important as well, and promised that he wouldn't let Sonic down.  
With this established, Tails' thoughts turned to his own problems and how he was to resolve them. What would Sonic do?  
_He would look for the answers. He would find the truth._  
And that was what must be done.  
Tails opened the door to his room and peered out into the interior of the tower. It was dark and quiet, with minimal lighting. One thing that Tails found odd about the avians was how much they slept. There would be very few people awake in here by now, even though the night was still fairly young. There were no night owls; only early birds.  
Closing his eyes, Tails dropped into the darkness.  
He spun his tails and fell into a circling pattern, hugging the walls of the tower, passing hundreds of closed doorways, the small rooms in which the birds roosted and the labs in which they worked. What was housed in these labs, Tails shuddered to imagine. Things that defied and defiled nature, the meddlings of apprentice gods. This was a project that had been underway for some decades, probably started by Badoru Kukku's own father or ancestors, with a huge amount of resources behind it. If Tails was to decide that these people had to be stopped, how could he possibly achieve that? He couldn't stand up against the Armada. He couldn't bring down their towers or destroy their research. He could bring down the Quarantine fence, at least temporarily, but the people wouldn't want to leave. They had everything they wanted. Like Tails himself, back in Station Square all those years ago, escape was not an option. One could not escape with nowhere to go. If anything, opening the fence would leave them vulnerable to attacks by the vengeful and bloodthirsty exiles beyond it, and that was not something he wanted.  
He'd come here to fulfil his father's promise to free the Kitsunes from the Armada, but now that he was here, he realised that he had no idea how. At this point, his mission was a stalemate. But if action was beyond him, then the least he could do was seek out the truth. It was all he had.  
He landed in the machines factory near the base of the tower, and though the lights had all been switched off, his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark.  
He liked this place; of everywhere else in this pristine wonderland of riches and luxury, this was the place that felt the most like home. Dust and scraps littered work benches, in front of shelves packed with debris and machine components. A mechanic's dreamworld. Tails passed the silent workbenches and machines with his eyes fogging up. He remembered Rotor's workshop and all that he had taught Tails about mechanics and metalwork, and remembered that he hadn't even said goodbye to the jovial walrus. In his haste to get out of New Knothole, fuelled by emotion, he hadn't thought to say a single word to those who he truly cared about. He doubted he'd ever even said thanks for all that the Freedom Fighters had done for him.  
_You're still a brat_, he thought, _Even after all this time, you're the same little thankless brat that Sonic brought back from Station Square._ His lower lip trembled and he hardened his face to stop from crying. No more weakness, Tails, you're not the victim anymore. And if you give yourself the chance, you can make this all better.  
He stopped in front of a tall window and placed one hand on the glass as he stared through. Hiding on the other side, encapsulated in shadow, was the Tornado. The little plane that had taken him and Sonic on so many adventures over the years. The Armada had repaired it, good as new. They had even repainted it. For some reason, Tails felt a surge of anger for this fact. He was furious at these people for taking him in, providing for him, treating him like one of them. After what they had done, he would rather be out there with the exiles, eating dirt.  
He stood in the silence for a long time, just he and his plane, thinking. He'd been standing so long that a sudden shout from behind him almost scared him inside-out.  
"_Hey retard!_"  
Tails spun around, his back flat against the wall, as the shout echoed throughout the empty factory. He searched madly for the source of it, sure that he'd been cornered by the exiles, and that they were going to rend him limb from limb, this time with nobody around to save him.  
"_Over here!_ Gettin' warmer, now. _Here_, you idiot, man you _are_ a retard."  
Then he saw it.  
Dalziel was locked up in an animal cage in the corner of the factory. He gripped the bars with both hands, grinning that snide, toothy grin, and staring at Tails with the fires of hatred in his eyes.  
"What's life like on the outside?" he asked, "Must be nice to live among the lords and masters, huh? Free as a bird, so to speak?"  
"Dalziel," Tails gasped, "What are you doing here?"  
"Well, I kinda don't really know," he spat, "Lots of surprises in _my_ future. My oh my, I shudder to think about the experiments they have in store for me. Always handy to have another guinea pig around the place. You really _delivered_, they must be proud of you."  
Another voice, speaking from elsewhere: "Aaah, put a sock in it, you foghorn."  
Something climbed out of a pile of debris on one of the workbenches, something with two little yellow lights on the front. With a whirring, ticking sound it took off and flew toward Tails.  
"Tock," he sighed, "It's more crowded in here than I thought. What are _you_ doing here?"  
"I don't sleep, Buckaroo," the clockwork robot replied, "Might as well explore. Thought I might find myself a girlfriend down here."  
"What if you wind down again?"  
"Won't happen! I'm all fixed up!" The robot spun a loop in mid-air, as though to prove his health. "Cream-puff gave me a replacement spring. This baby'll last days!"  
"Must be a relief."  
"Happy happy days, everybody," Dalziel snarled.  
Tock whizzed over to the exile's cage and hovered in front of his face. "Grumble all you want, nastypants, you got what was coming to you!"  
"You weren't so cocky when I smashed you in half with that rock, small-fry," the exile snarled through clenched teeth.  
"Last rock you'll ever pick up, nasty," the robot said, and let out a little digital whine that might have been its equivalent of blowing a raspberry. Then he returned to Tails.  
"So, we know why I'm here," he said, "And we know why nasty over there is here, but the remaining question is... what's _your_ story, Buckaroo?"  
"I'm looking for answers," Tails said, "Just some things I need to know."  
"Things like what?"  
Tails sighed, and looked around the dark factory. "Answers," he said, "If I could just find some kind of... files. Records. Information that the Armada might keep on the people of Quarantine. My parents..."  
"Well, I probably shouldn't tell you this," Tock said, "But since you _did_ help me out so much, bring me in from the wilderness and all that..."  
"What is it?"  
"Well... follow me!"  
The robot zipped down a corridor, and Tails followed. Running past darkened halls and shrouded doorways, his only guide the light from the little robot's eyes. They hurried through the sleeping complex for some time, before Tock finally ducked into a room through an unspectacular portal, above which was printed the word:  
_ENGINE_  
"What is this?" Tails asked, squinting in the darkness. "Engine? What kind of engine?"  
"_Analytical_ engine," Tock replied, and the little robot hit a switch on the wall that fired up the lights. Tails gasped as the darkness was chased away.  
Hundreds of computer terminals were laid out before him. Thousands, perhaps. Monitors lined the walls; small ones, huge ones, wide ones and tall ones. Many were scrolling through data, numbers and pixellated dots swimming across screens. The buzzing and clicking of hard drives, the flashing green light of the blinking numbers.  
"What _is_ this place?" he gasped.  
"This game takes a lot of data, Buckaroo. A thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters, and all that." He buzzed over the sea of technology, his rotor blades whirring. "This is where they unlocked the mobian genome! Thousands and millions and _billions_ of terabytes of data, just counting genes, measuring chromosomes. Simulation programs run hypothetical gene sequences in simulated organisms and crunch the results. This is where it all happens, Buckaroo, and of course, the files are all here. Records on every mobian who's ever set foot in Quarantine or out of it. It's all here."  
Tails, feeling overwhelmed, sat down at the nearest terminal and stared at the blinking cursor.  
"How do I get into it?"  
Tock landed on the desk next to him and retracted his propellor. "Well, you know, I really shouldn't be telling you this, Buckaroo. I don't think the bosses are going to be real impressed."  
"Please, Tock. This is important. This might be the most important moment of my life. The truth about my parents is in here." He felt the tears begin to well up again, and this time he thought that, if they came, he would just let them flow. "I have to know, Tock. _I have to know_."  
"Well... okay, Buckaroo. Now listen carefully."  
The robot told him what he needed to know to break into the Armada's records, and soon he was faced with a simple prompt:

**ENTER QUERY**

Tails took a deep breath and typed:

**PROWER TREVOR**

His finger hovered over the _enter_ key, but he couldn't make it work. His hand weakened, his arm numbed. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead. Were these things that he really wanted to know? He knew that the truth could be more painful than the angst of mystery. Tock, the clockwork robot, looked up at him with his lightbulb-eyes dimmed.  
"Go ahead, Buckaroo," he said, "If you need this, go ahead."  
And he did need it. Fear aside, panic notwithstanding, all his life he had needed this. Since Nails had puffed on that cigar and told him matter-of-factly that his father was dead. Since Sonic had rescued him from a life of crime and misery. Since Tyler had wept and told him of his past, of Trevor's promise, and of his own demons. Tails needed to know.  
He hit the key, took a deep, trembling breath, and held it.  
The computer churned out its response:

**PROWER TREVOR**

SEX: M  
CATEGORY: RED VULPINE  
STATUS: CAPABLE

GENERATION: 4  
SPAWN: 1 (M CORRUPT)  
> query  
MATE: 1  
> query  
PEER: 1  
> query

NOTES:  
Location unknown;  
Escaped containment;  
Irretrievable (effective termination);  


The profile was followed by a large amount of technical information that Tails couldn't understand, detailing his father's genetic code and other things pertaining to the Armada's project. He stared at it for a long time, feeling as though he had just stumbled upon his father's headstone. Scrolling down, he found a photograph of Trevor, as he had looked shortly before he left the island, and ran his fingers over the screen as though he could hold it in his hands.  
_That's my father. There he is._  
It was the first he'd seen of Trevor since the last time he'd seen him in the flesh back in Station Square. He let his breath out and mourned for a moment, squeezing his temples with his trembling hands.  
"You okay, Buckaroo?"  
"Yeah," he said, "Memories. You underestimate the power of a photograph, sometimes."  
He returned to the profile and read over it again. Strange was the line that read **SPAWN: 1**. The date attached to the screen noted that this profile hadn't been updated for twelve years - not since Trevor and he had left the island. Kukku had told Tails that his existance had been unknown to the Armada until now. So if _spawn_ referred to Trevor's offspring, then he'd already had one recorded before Tails had been born.  
_That explains a lot, when you consider his motives. It'd happened to him before._  
"This isn't the hardest part," he said, "That's still to come."  
"Well hurry up," Tock replied.  
Tails took another deep breath, and typed another query:

**PROWER YARED**

But the computer returned:

**RECORD NOT FOUND**

_Of course, you idiot_, he told himself, _Yared was your _mother's_ brother. His name wasn't Prower._  
"Okay, time to stop procrastinating," he said aloud, "Let's get this over with."  
He typed. Hit enter. Another profile. Tails felt his heart land in his shoe.

**PROWER MELISSA  
MAIDEN: PIDMORE**

SEX: F  
CATEGORY: RED VULPINE  
STATUS: CORRUPT

GENERATION: 4  
SPAWN: 1 (M CORRUPT)  
> query  
MATE: 1  
> query  
PEER: 1  
> query

BREEDING FOR THIS SUBJECT HAS CEASED

NOTES:  
Subject regarded incapable for participation;  
Flagged for review;  
SUBJECT TERMINATED  


Tails clenched his fists as he read the final line, over and over again. His breath rasped and his heart thudded. Every time he read it he hoped that it would turn out not to be true, a glitch on the screen or in his brain.

**SUBJECT TERMINATED**

"_No!_" he screamed, and his voice echoed through the empty hall.  
"Buckaroo-?"  
"_No! No!_"  
He pounded on the keyboard, another query:

**PIDMORE YARED**

SEX: M  
CATEGORY: RED VULPINE  
STATUS: CORRUPT

GENERATION: 4  
SPAWN: 0  
> query  
MATE: 0  
> query  
PEER: 1  
> query

BREEDING FOR THIS SUBJECT BARRED

NOTES:  
Subject regarded incapable for participation;  
Flagged for review;  
SUBJECT REMOVED  
/ Flagged for wilful misbehavior, subject to review;  
/ SUBJECT TERMINATED  


Another:

**PROWER TYLER**

SEX: M  
CATEGORY: RED VULPINE  
STATUS: OTHER

THIS SUBJECT REFERRED TO SPECIAL PROJECT  


He input more queries, throwing names into the computer almost as fast as it could process them. His fingers punched the keys so hard that he could just about have broken them.  
On a whim, he typed one final name. What the computer told him now sent him over the edge.

**SUBJECT TERMINATED**

Tails' eyes ran furiously over each new set of information. His mother, _terminated_. One uncle exiled, and another possessed. His entire family had been snatched away by these people, scattered into the wind, put down like animals.  
"_No!_" he screamed again, and leaped to his feet. "_No, no, no!_" He beat his fists on the desk as his face and eyes turned red.  
"Buckaroo, you-"  
Tails ignored the robot, his hands covering his face, shaking his head. He stumbled backward, grabbed the keyboard and started beating it against the desk.  
Tock took off with his rotor blades and hovered away from Tails, as though fearing the fox might take a swipe at him, which was entirely likely. Plastic keys were flying off the keyboard in a hail. At last, Tails let out another scream, and put the keyboard through the computer screen.  
In a shower of sparks and noise, the computer imploded, flames licking its chassis.  
"I'm outta here!" Tock exclaimed, and zipped away. Tails took no notice. Tears streaming down his face, fifteen years of pain finally exploded from his small body, and these computers, the purveyors of the news he had never wanted to hear, were to absorb every pound of his wrath.  
Tails ripped monitors out of the wall, cords sparking and snapping, and smashed them against each other, again and again, until they were unrecognisable as anything but scrap. He cut his hands on the glass. He kicked the hard drives over and stomped them into twisted fragments.  
Rows and rows of monitors, each of them displaying the same flickering information:

**SUBJECT TERMINATED**

**SUBJECT TERMINATED**

**SUBJECT TERMINATED**

Tails picked up a chair and began smashing every screen that he could see. He reached into the smoldering ruins and pulled out handfuls of wires, ripped out hard drives with his bare, bleeding hands and smashed them against the floor, stomping on their remains.  
"_No!_"  
Nails the Bat cackled through a cloud of smoke. "Afraid so, kid. Your Dad? He was a spineless freak, just like you. And he got what was coming to him. Mummy, too. Heck, your whole stinkin' family, the whole circus-sideshow lot of them. If you said they were deadbeats, you'd be half right."  
Tails saw Nails' face in one of the monitors, laughing and smoking. He found a heavy metal bar, and swung it over his head as he cried out. The image in the computer exploded when the guts of the monitor burst out, sparks and debris littering the floor. He bashed it again and again, then moved onto the next, in which he saw Dalziel's mangy visage.  
"Calm down, retard," he said, "What do you think you're gonna achieve? You can't change anything, you're just a weak little freak like the rest of us. Useless. _Stupid_. Face it, your parents sacrificed themselves for the sake of a dumb little retard who's about as useful as screen doors on a submarine. There's nothing you can do, _nothing_. You've failed _everybody_."  
He smashed it. The plastic casing tore apart in halves as the metal bar sliced through it, the glass bursting outward. Sparks and wires. He moved on again, and through the next monitor peered Lieutenant Overdraw, his eyes aflame with hatred.  
"You can train a _beast_ to sit at a _table_ and _dress_ in _mobian clothes_, yes, but you can _not_ make him a _person_. You are only animals, yes? We will _put you down_ like animals, yes?"  
"_You don't have the right!_" Tails screamed, and beat the monitor into shrapnel. He swung the bar like a bat, taking out rows of screens at a time, silencing them all. Blood from his hands ran down the bar and dripped on the ground. His nose bled again and soaked the bandage over his head. He dropped the bar and grabbed his ears, crushing them in his hands, and dropped to his knees in the wreckage.  
He looked up and saw his fathers lined up before him. All of them. All of those who had, throughout his life, either claimed the title or won it through deed. Nails, scowling and smoking his cigar in a crisp, dark pinstripe suit. Sonic, wry grin, standing proud with his chest puffed out and his hands on his hips, winking. Flightless Joe, the tall crane wearing oil-spattered denim overalls and smiling warmly. Rotor the Walrus, holding a spanner with one hand and scratching his head, feigning modesty. Badoru Kukku, the lord of abominations, beckoning to him from his flowing, colourful robes. Tyler, the full moon reflected in his eyes, smiling on the surface but crying inside, where a beast lurked under his skin.  
And standing over him, alive and well, was Trevor Prower, the one who had given him life. He offered Tails a hand, and smiled that fatherly smile.  
Tails looked up at his father with his eyes red with tears, and he let them flow. Fifteen years of tears, he let them flow.  
"Dad," he sobbed, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."  
And Trevor shook his head.  
"Miles. My son. This is not your burden."  
"I failed _everyone_, Dad. Everyone's gone."  
"Our lives were given so that yours may not be, Miles. We don't need you to avenge us. We _only want you to live_."  
"Everyone who cared about me is dead."  
"Not everyone. There are people out there who care about you, and you care about them. Their cause is yours, now. Their mission. Not mine. _This is not your burden._"  
Tails wiped away his tears and took his father's hand.  
"I love you, Dad."  
"I love you too, Miles. I'm so proud of you, boy."  
And with a strength not shared by the dead he pulled his son to his feet.

---

**10:00 pm**

When Cream found Tails, he was sitting alone with his head between his legs, in one of Sanctuary's grand halls. She descended from the tower's dark inverted abyss, landing softly on her slippered feet. She wore a slip over a pair of pink pyjama bottoms printed with a pattern of bird wings. Behind her, the little robot named Tock hovered on his rotor blades, lighting the way with his lightbulb eyes.  
"There he is," he said, "Poor kid, he's done himself in."  
They could not see the devastation that Tails had caused in the computer room; he had fled from that graveyard of memories. When Cream ran to him, put arm around his shoulder, he looked up at him with hid face soaked with tears and his eyes red and bloodshot from crying them. He put his hand over hers and held her close.  
"Tock fetched me," she said softly, "Oh Tails, what is wrong? What is the matter?" She put a hand under his chin and raised his head, ran the other down his cheek. "You are bleeding."  
"Cream," he said, "I need to ask you-"  
"Anything, Tails."  
"Can you- Can you take me flying?"  
"Tails-"  
"Just one more time. I need to."  
Though the rabbit couldn't quite understand Tails' motives, she looked into his eyes and could see that he was serious. And what did it really matter? She loved him like a brother. He might have been the only one in the world who had shared her unique pain. If she could do something for him, she would.  
And so she took his hand in hers, and turned back toward the tower's core.  
"No," Tails said, "Not up there. Outside."  
"You kids are loopy," Tock said, "Completely nuts."  
"We'll be back soon," Cream told him, "Wait for us."  
The night air had a cold bite to it, as it rushed through Tails' fur. It blew away his pain. Hand in hand, the fox and the rabbit soared high above the ground, neither of them born to be confined to the tyranny of gravity.  
Tails loved to look down and see the forest so far below him. The trees, their roots clinging deep to the bedrock, they knew nothing about the freedom of flight. True flight, a secret held by birds, but which the birds had decided to share. He was unrestrained, unshackled. His burdens had been lifted from him, and now he was released from their weight. He felt as though he could rise forever.  
They flew around the tower, corkscrewed upward, higher and higher until they were almost in the stratosphere. It was the highest Tails had ever been without a plane, and maybe even with one. He told her so, and she declared likewise. Still, neither one admitted any fear, for neither had anything to fear from the sky. That was a fear for ground-dwellers, but not for them.  
They passed over the mighty obelisk, the Armada's Sanctuary, peering down through the clouds at the dark glass pyramid at its top, which housed Badoru Kukku's private garden. Together they skimmed over the upper atmosphere of the world, looked out over the expanse of clouds beneath them, soared over it as conquerors, as masters. The air was thin up here, and if Tails looked up he could see the blanket of stars unobstructed, more stars than he had ever imagined existed. There was an infinity out there. He marvelled at the enormity of it all as they descended back toward Mobius.  
Tails and Cream circled the Kitsune Atole, peering out over its flawless beaches. Beautiful, untainted forests met the glittering, clear ocean, buffered by a rim of fine white sand. The Armada were right to call this place Babylon, after a forgotten paradise where nature and beauty reigned supreme, uncorrupted and free. This could indeed be a paradise... if not for the people who called it so.  
As Tails looked out over this world of beauty, he gave himself to the sky. Pledged his soul eternal. To be one with the rushing wind, the bite of the cold and the freedom of release. He was released. He was free. He was whole.

---

**10:37 pm**

"There are things you need to know, Cream," he said, "Things that you're not going to want to accept, but you have to hear them."  
"I trust you, Tails."  
Their feet dangled in the open air as they sat side by side on the cold tile. The village of Quarantine had an old-fashioned bell tower, the highest point in town, and they sat atop its sloped roof to watch over the quiet cottages. Tails looked at her and sighed, wondering where he could possibly begin. Hitting an innocent child with something like this was an almost wretched thing to do. But far more wretched would be to let her remain ignorant. This concerned her as well, for better or worse. If she stayed with the Armada, he would respect her decision. But she had to know.  
"I was born here," he said, "In Quarantine. You know that already. I was born in secret, my parents didn't want anybody to know I existed."  
"How strange. Why should they want that?"  
Tails took a deep breath and looked down at the village. He wondered which of these cottages he had been born inside. Pictured his mother, dressing in loose-fitting clothes, deliberately gaining weight quickly in a desperate bid to hide her conspicuous secret.  
"Cream... do you know who the exiles are?"  
"Beasts," she said, "Horrid people, wild folk."  
"But do you know where they come from?"  
"Father has to remove them from Quarantine because they are too wild. He calls them _throwbacks_. They are not evolved, like the rest."  
"Well, I guess in a way that's true. Every so often somebody is born in Quarantine who looks a little strange, and those people have to be taken away before they have children of their own."  
"Of course, or else they would pollute Father's project."  
"But they can't choose the way they look, can they? They can't change who they are."  
Cream shook her head. "I have asked Father these questions. I asked him once why he cannot simply cure the exiles, teach them how to be civilised so that they can live like the rest. He told me that it is beyond our power. They are how they are, and though it is sad, the best that we can do is help those who we can."  
"My mother and father," Tails said, "They had a child who was different somehow. A son. The Armada put him into exile. A brother, who was sent away before I knew him. Before I was born."  
Cream looked up at him. "I'm sorry," she said.  
He nodded. "They didn't want him to be taken, but it was the law. So when my mother knew that she was pregnant again, they already knew the risks."  
"They could still have asked for help. Father, he only wants to help people."  
"They just couldn't bear the thought that they were going to lose another child. It must have been incredibly difficult, but they hid the fact that I was there, right to the end. Then, when I was born, and they saw that I was different..."  
"But _you_ aren't a throwback! You're one of Father's _successes_, like me!"  
Tails shook his head. "My parents couldn't have known that. The Armada probably wouldn't have, either. I didn't know I could fly until I was six years old. Until then, I was just a freak baby with two tails. I would have been exiled, and my parents knew it. Both my Mum and my Dad had brothers exiled, and their first son was too much to bear. They couldn't lose me as well."  
"Oh, Tails! I _am_ sorry!"  
"Don't be sorry, I- I'm not fishing for sympathy, I'm just telling you this because it's what I know. And what you should know."  
"Okay."  
"Your father... his people... it's taken them a long time to learn what they know now. There's been a lot of experiments, a lot of trials, probably thousands over the years. They did all sorts of things to all sorts of people in order to learn about genetics. How to... _change_ people. My uncle, Tyler, he was one of their experiments. They implanted him with some kind of monster. But they mustn't have been happy with the result, because he was sent into exile as well."  
"Now _that_ sounds silly!"  
"Not silly," Tails snapped, "The thing in him hurt people. _Killed_ them. It might have killed my best friend."  
"Oh... sorry."  
"No, I'm- I'm sorry, listen, it's-" He frowned and looked over the town again. He pictured the story as he told it, overlaying the events over the empty village, making them vivid. Making them clear. "My Dad must have been in contact with my uncles, even though they were in exile. I guess they set dates to speak through the fence, when nobody was watching. I know because it was my uncles who helped him to escape."  
"Escape _Quarantine?_"  
"Yes. Tyler, the one with the monster in him, he did it somehow. I'm not sure how they organised it, but somehow they used Nightmare - the monster - to help break us out. My Dad and I. They found a boat, or made one, and used it to get away from the island. It was a huge plan, it must have been very difficult to organise, but they did it all. Just for me. To save me."  
"You make it sound like a prison!" Cream exclaimed, "They're not prisoners."  
"They have a barbed-wire fence around them."  
"To keep the exiles out!"  
"Only the three of us left," he continued, "My father, Uncle Tyler, and me. My mother didn't come, and my uncle Yared stayed behind so she wouldn't be alone. At first I thought that she'd preferred to stay in Quarantine, that she'd given me up, maybe because she didn't want me. But now I know... she stayed because she _couldn't_ come with us."  
"Why not?"  
"It's because of who she was. A female, a _breeder_. Your father and his people tagged her somehow so that they could always know where she was. If she'd escaped with us... the Armada could have tracked us down, wherever we went. She knew that I'd never be safe, so she gave me a chance... She basically sacrificed herself for me."  
Cream didn't look impressed. She was giving him a cock-eyed look and growing more flustered. Tails wasn't surprised. Nobody wants to hear these things about the people close to them. He imagined how he would feel if somebody told him that his own father was a liar and a villain. It wasn't easy, but if she would only listen to the end, then she would see...  
"You're saying some very silly things!" she exclaimed, "_Sacrifice?_ Is it a _sacrifice_ to stay and live in paradise? You sound like it was a _rescue!_ But how can it be a rescue if they took you to Terra Nullius? How can you be rescued from a _good_ place and taken somewhere _bad?_ It sounds like you're all mixed up-"  
"Please, Cream, let me finish-"  
"You're just confused. Father would-"  
"Cream. You have to hear the end of this. There's something you need to know, but I have to tell you this first."  
"Fine, then."  
"It was a sacrifice because my mother knew that something was going to happen to her. Because she was _corrupted_, Cream. She'd had two children and they were both wrong. What you call _throwbacks_. Your father doesn't tolerate women who just breed exiles, they just pollute the gene pool, but he won't send women into exile, either."  
"What are you trying to say?"  
"I'm saying they-" The pain began to well up again, but he bit down and pushed it back. He had to finish. For her sake, he had to finish. "They _killed my mother_, Cream. They just took her out of the equation, along with anyone else who doesn't fit, who doesn't help this stupid, ridiculous project. My uncle Yared, he stayed behind to look out for her, but they killed _him_ too. I don't know why, probably because he helped us escape, or maybe he tried to stop them getting to my Mum. They took _everyone_, Cream, my whole family, anyone who didn't get off this island. But it's not just me, that's what I'm talking about. This is just the _way it works_, they're doing it all the time, to lots of people-"  
"You're _lying!_" Cream shrieked, and she threw her hands to the sides of her head, as though she had any hope of blocking her enormous ears. "_Why_ would you _say_ things like this? You're trying to tell me _lies!_"  
"Please, Cream, I have to finish-"  
"Why would you _say_ this, _why?_"  
"-you have to know-"  
"_No!_" The rabbit stood up and stomped her foot. "I don't want to hear it! I thought you were my friend."  
"I _am_, Cream-"  
"No, you're just being mean and making up things to upset me. Well, I don't want to know about it anymore."  
"_Please!_"  
But the girl had made up her mind. On the verge of tears, she leaped off the bell tower and spread her ears, gliding and then flying away. She headed back toward Sanctuary.  
"You have to hear this, Cream, _please!_" The fox spun his tails and took off after her. But he knew already what was going to happen. He soared for twenty meters before a fierce cramp hit his tails and he began to descend. The girl in the pink pyjamas flew out of his vision as he fell into a steep dive and hit the ground with a thump.

---

_Nails' office was full of smoke when Tails had entered, as it so often was. He'd come to ask where his father was. Usually Trevor was up early in the morning to say goodbye to his son before work, but this morning he broke tradition for the very first time. When Tails had gone to check on him, he had found his father already gone. Nowhere to be found.  
Nails was sitting in the dark in his office, a silhouette but for the red point of light that was the fire at the end of his cigar. It glowed redder every now and then when he sucked on it, and the shadow let out a billow of black smoke.  
Something didn't seem right, today. Something wasn't comfortable. Nails wasn't his usual chummy, hospitable self. He just ignored Tails' question, sucking on that cigar, blowing out smoke with a hiss of breeze. Something seemed cold.  
Tails repeated the question, and was met with more silence. Now he grew very uncomfortable, and more than a little afraid. Nails broke the silence at last.  
"Forget it, kid." The words were flat. Frigid. "Got a bit of bad news for you, I'm afraid. He's gone. They both are. Had an argument with a bullet, and the bullet won."  
Tails always remembered how his blood had run cold at that moment. Like ice water.  
This was the reality of life, though. Tails had learned to live in the wild lands and accept all that came as part of that. The reality of life was that it ended. And sometimes, or most of the time, death didn't wait for its victims to complete their business in the world. To make good on their promises.  
Sometimes, it just didn't make any sense at all._

---

**7:48 pm**

"...Tails..."  
The fox blinked his eyes open, and saw the sky. Fluffy, white clouds. Clear blue sky. No wind. A nice day for flying.  
"...Tails, my boy..."  
He was one his back, his tails curled around his body for warmth. He frowned and sat up. A garden... The garden at the base of the tower. He'd fallen asleep outside, couldn't bear to return to Sanctuary. As he looked around, he saw dozens of stony faces. _Beaked_ faces. Some were suited in white and some in black. And standing over him, wearing his colourful robes, was Badoru Kukku. Tails could see Overdraw there as well, with a smug grin. Standing behind her father's legs was Cremaria Kukku, looking forlorn.  
"We may need to discuss matters," Kukku said, wearing the stern expression of an incensed father. It was the same expression that his own father had worn when Tails had upset him.  
"That's probably a good idea," Tails replied.  
"My daughter has told me a great many troubling things. It seems you've been spreading some rather venomous rumours."  
"Really? Any of them true?"  
"Slander, in itself, is something I can certainly look past. All that you are hurting is my pride, after all. But _my daughter_... She is only twelve, and you've scared her quite badly. Then, of course, there is the matter of the substantial damage that you have done to our property."  
"I told her what she had to know," Tails spat, "I told her what you wouldn't."  
Kukku dropped to his knees, and leaned close to him. "Tails, what is _wrong?_ We've taken you into our home, I have taken you in as a son, given you everything you could ever need. Why would you turn against me?"  
"You only took me in because of what I represent. Me and Cream both. You don't love us, Kukku, you love _yourself_. Every time your freaks flap their arms or ears or tails and fly around, you see yourself and fall in love all over again. And after what you've done to my family, I consider your hospitality an _insult_."  
Kukku looked like he'd been stabbed. "Why would you say these hurtful things?"  
"_Because you're a selfish, conceited, murderous old turkey!_" Tails shouted in his face, "_It's less than you deserve!_"  
"Whatever you have heard, Tails, you're confused. You don't understand."  
"Oh, there's no mistake."  
Tails stood up and took on a defensive stance, but he knew that he was in trouble. He was completely surrounded, and the soldiers in black had taken a few steps forward, ahead of the scientists. Many of them were holding batons and other ominous looking objects. A few had sticks with loops of wire on the end, much like what they used to capture dangerous animals.  
"I have always been concerned about this one, yes?" Overdraw said, "This interloper from the _wild lands_, he knows nothing of the _civilised_ way to live. He comes to us _naked_, yes, in a mechanical flying machine. He associates with animals, invites them into our paradise. He has been nothing but trouble since he arrived."  
"Overdraw, I-" Kukku looked choked up, conflicted. "Maybe it's best if you-"  
"He must be _removed!_" Overdraw exclaimed.  
"I'm sorry, Tails. I'm starting to think that... if it's for the best, that you..."  
The Armada soldiers began to advance. Some of the weapons that Tails couldn't identify sparked at the end like tasers. He remembered the skirmish between Overdraw and Dale, the wolf shrieking and convulsing as though electrocuted. Tails was entirely surrounded, he saw only one chance open to him, and he took it before thinking.  
Breaking suddenly into a sprint, he shoved Badoru Kukku out of the way and grabbed Cream around the waist. She screamed and thrashed against him, but he held tight, trying to look menacing and dangerous without actually hurting her.  
"_No!_" Kukku shrieked, and held his hand out, "_Stop! Stop, all of you stop!_"  
The soldiers stopped advancing. Tails had to move around quickly so that he didn't have his back to any of them for long, but he knew this wouldn't work for more than a few moments. These people were trained.  
"_Tails, let go!_" Cream pleaded.  
"Back off," he said firmly, "Everybody _back off_."  
Kukku trembled in fear and nervousness, reached out to Cream even though he didn't dare approach. "_You unhand my daughter!_"  
"Are you starting to find out how it feels, Kukku? When you think you might lose a member of your family? After you've torn apart so many? It's just a fact of life, for you, isn't it?"  
"Please, you don't know what you're talking about-"  
"How many have you murdered over the years? What's the death toll of this insane project?"  
"_I don't murder!_" he protested, "I don't- _Murder_ is something done with malicious intent."  
"But you've killed."  
"Not _personally!_"  
Kukku seemed to see the distress in his daughter's eyes when he said this. She stopped thrashing against Tails' grip and instead looked at her father with a kind of pained confusion. He raised his fingers to his temples and averted his gaze. "I've done _only_ what is necessary," he said, "Sometimes difficult decisions need to be made. I don't like it, but it's _science_, we must look past these things. Please understand that."  
The soldiers were advancing again, very slowly. Whenever Tails turned his back to one of them, the bird would take another step. Overdraw was the closest, his eyes stony as he held out his sparking rod.  
"Don't talk to me about remorse," Tails said, "You had my mother killed."  
"Tails, _please!_ Let us talk about this."  
"We're talking."  
"But _let my daughter go!_"  
Tails' time was up. He was about to meet the bad end of one of those electric sticks if he didn't end this. He had a story to finish. Cream had flown away before he had a chance to finish what he had to say, but right now, with the girl squirming in his arms and the Armada advancing from every direction, he was going to be heard.  
"You killed my mother," he spat, "And you killed _her_ mother too."  
Kukku froze solid. His eyes widened and rolled about in their sockets, and his beak trembled and stammered. "Tails-"  
"I looked it up," Tails continued, "On the computers. The file is right there. Do you remember her? Vanilla Rae. You had her killed because she wouldn't _breed_."  
"No-"  
"After her husband died she was useless to you. She wouldn't take another partner, she was just dead weight, using up resources. Inefficient. Uncooperative. You did her in for it, isn't that right?"  
"_No!_"  
"Tell the girl to her face, Kukku, the girl you call your daughter. I think she deserves to know that _you killed her mother_-"  
"_Because she wouldn't let her go!_" Kukku screamed.  
A long silence. The sound of the leaves rustling in a low breeze. The zoic birds chirped, unperturbed by their anthric masters. It was broken at last by a little girl's trembling voice.  
"-father?-"  
"You... you have to understand..." Kukku stammered, "Cremaria, you are the most important thing to ever happen to me, to my _work_. You are a little miracle, a prodigy, a _conquest_. You've breathed life into the project. It was _imperative_ that we... learn from you. For the sake of everyone, Cremaria, for the sake of the _world!_ Your mother... she didn't understand! I pleaded with her. I _begged_ her. She just would not listen to reason! She wanted you all to herself. I had to do what I had to do. The woman did it to herself, she forced my hand!"  
"_Fatherrrrr!_" Cremaria cried, the end of the word drowned by tears, "Oh Father no, Father _no! No!_"  
"All for _you_, Cremaria, for the _world_, for the _project!_ I beg you to consider what is _important!_ All that I have taught you-"  
Somebody swiped at Tails with one of the electric rods, and he just barely dodged it. Several others broke into a run, their rods and batons raised, and Tails braced himself to fight back. He wasn't going to be taken easily. He vaguely heard Kukku shouting at them not to shock him or else _she_ would also be hurt, but Tails didn't think they were paying much attention, now. Overdraw was their Lieutenant, and Overdraw was leading the advance.  
But that's when they took off.  
Before Tails even understood what was happening, he was leaving the ground behind. Although he was heavier than Cream, and he wasn't bearing their weight with his tails, the little girl was carrying the both of them on the burden of her winglike ears. He grasped her waist so that she would not run, but now it was so that he would not fall. She was saving him, although she had nothing to fear from the Armada, and although it must have caused her immense pain and tremendous effort to do so. Tails didn't understand why, but he didn't take it for granted. He spun his tails and the two of them soared away.  
"Thank you," he whispered in her ear.  
Cream was crying uncontrollably, and through her sobs she said "We can't get away."  
It was true. Overdraw and his soldiers could fly much better than a fox and a rabbit. There was one possibility, but typically, it was risky.  
"Cream, we have to turn around," he said, "We have to return to the tower."  
"They'll catch us!"  
"You have to trust me. Please, Cream. I've never lied to you. We can make it."  
"Back to the tower?"  
"Back to the tower."  
They performed a wide mid-air loop and flew back the other way. Overdraw and the Armada army were indeed in hot persuit, a flock of blackbirds with their heads down and their wings beating in regulated unison. Tails and Cream flew over them as they passed below, and headed back toward the towers of Sanctuary.  
"We have to go inside," Tails said.  
"_We'll be trapped!_"  
"Trust me."  
And she did. He wasn't sure why, but she did. Tails positioned himself behind her and spun his tails vertical rather than horizontal, in the way he often did when he was running, for extra propulsion. The strange machine that they made together looked something like a living plane, rabbit ears for wings and fox tails for props, and it worked. Their flight sped up twofold, and they rocketed toward the tower. Later, Tails couldn't remember whether he'd been whooping out loud, or just in his head.  
Behind them, the Armada peeled off, looped around like a fleet of battle jets, and came back the other way. Overdraw was in the lead, and Tails thought he could see the hate in his eyes even from here.  
As they dipped out of the sky to enter the tower, they passed over the beautiful garden at its foot. The last that Tails ever saw of Badoru Kukku was now, as the bird sat in this garden with his head shrouded in his wings. He looked ashamed, but Tails wondered if he really was. He wished that he could ask. He wanted to believe that Kukku was repenting, that in some abstract way he really had fulfilled his father's promise to free the people of this island, but deep down he knew it wasn't to be. His visit here would change nothing.  
(this is not your burden)  
Except that it _had_ changed something. For the first time in his life, Tails could genuinely forgive himself.

---

8:15 am

They shot through the halls and catacombs of Kukku's Sanctuary faster than either had ever flown, and Tails knew that in a way they really were siblings. They just fit together, and with Cream he felt unstoppable.  
"Where are we going?" Cream asked, growing urgency in her voice.  
It was the factory they needed to seek. The machine shop, where the Armada kept their scraps and from where they built their paradise... and where they kept the biplane that they had repaired for him. The piece of technology at which they snubbed their beaks and that they regarded as hopelessly inferior - the machine that was going to thwart them. For Tails yearned to see the feathered jerks try to keep up with his Tornado.  
When they arrived in the shop and tried to land, they almost crashed on their faces for the speed they were travelling, but Tails managed to stabilise his flight partner and they landed without incident. He turned to run toward the warehouse where his plane was stored, when he heard a barking voice behind him that shocked him to a standstill.  
"Hey _retard!_"  
He turned and saw Dalziel. Still grinning, still caged. He gripped the bars with one hand and one clawed talon, and scowled, his yellow and rotting teeth dripping on the concrete. "In a _hurry?_"  
"I-"  
"Tails, we have to be quick! They're coming!" Cream exclaimed.  
He started toward the warehouse again, stopped, looked back at Dalziel, then trembled like he was trying to move in two directions at once.  
"What's wrong?" Cream asked.  
Tails recalled being used as a punching bag for no real reason, having his nose broken, being kicked in the gut and slapped around, and tried to convince himself that Dalziel had everything coming to him. But he wasn't Nails the Bat, nor was he Badoru Kukku. He was his father's son.  
"I have to let him out," he said, and ran to Dalziel's cage.  
"What- what are you doing?" the feral snarled, "You're gonna let me _out?_"  
"It's locked," Tails whined, as though this should be a revelation, and rattled the door with both hands.  
"No, _really?_" Dalziel barked, "Wouldn't have guessed."  
"Tock!" Cream came running up, holding a familiar gold-plated robot in her palm.  
Tails looked at it. "What's that gonna do?"  
"Tock's got a master key! He was a surveillance droid! He can open all the locks!" She cranked his key several times, and the little robot came to life.  
"Aw, I was having a great dream!" he complained, "No, that's a lie."  
"Quick, Tock! You have to open the cage!"  
The robot turned to the cage, looked at Dalziel, then turned back to Cream.  
"You're telling a joke."  
"It's no joke!" Tails said, "Hurry up, we don't have much time!"  
Tock's eyes flickered and the end of a key poked out of his face, where his nose might have been. Cream held him up to the keyhole, and he went to work, muttering all the while.  
"Quick, Tock!" he mimicked, "Jump into that jar of acid! Oh, hurry Tock! Fly into that aircraft engine! We don't have much time!"  
The lock clicked, and the cage door swung open.  
"Good!" Tails exclaimed, "Now let's go! We have to get back to the-"  
Dalziel struck him on the back of the head, and he went down on his stomach. The girl screamed as the feral cackled and kicked Tails twice in the side while he was down.  
"_Stupid!_" he roared, "_Stupid, stupid little freak!_"  
He glanced toward the hall that led out of the complex, his eyes aglow with the fires of the wild and the insane. He laughed, and kicked Tails once more for good measure, before he turned tail and ran down the hall.  
"_Dalziel, no!_" Tails gasped.  
"_So long, suckers!_" the feral fox yelled back, "_You'll never take me alive! You'll never, ever, _ever_ take Dalziel Prower alive!_"  
And with that, he was gone, only the residue of his voice lagging behind.  
Cream tried to help Tails to his feet, but he'd gone wooden. Paralysed.  
"_Prower_." He mouthed the word.  
(they had a child in exile)  
(a brother, sent away before I knew him)  
"Tails, come _on!_"  
"But I- I have to-"  
"Let him _go!_"  
"He's-"  
"You have to let him _go!_"  
Painstakingly, he ripped himself back to the now. She was right. This was something else that was not his burden. If he had known earlier, then perhaps... but now was now, and there was no time left.  
"Hey Buckaroo," Tock said, "Would this be a bad time to ask just _what_ the _heck_ is going on?"  
"Yes," Tails replied.  
"Oh. Okiedokie."  
"Tock, we need to get into the warehouse. Can you help us?"  
"Not a lock I can't open!" His propellor emerged from behind his key, and the little robot flew away toward the warehouse door. Tails turned to Cream, her hazel eyes wide with fear.  
"Cream, they won't punish you. It's me they want. They think I've kidnapped you, they don't know you've helped me. Your life can be the same as before, with your father-"  
"My _father_?" She spat the word out like it tasted bad. "I want my _mother_."  
Tails remembered the night that Sonic had taken him out of Station Square, rescued him from the employment of Nails the Bat. He remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, except now, in his mind, he was Sonic and Cream was him. He remembered exactly what Sonic had said to him, all those years ago; that he'd known a group of friendly people who could take him in and give him a good life, if he'd be willing to go. Now Tails looked into Cream's teary hazel eyes, into her wounded, weeping soul, and made for her the same offer.  
"Come with me," he said, barely above a whisper, and held out his hand.  
Cream wiped her tears away and nodded. She took his hand, and they ran toward the warehouse as the door swung open.  
"Open sesame!" Tock exclaimed, "Anything else I can do for you folks?"  
"Come on, Tock!" Cream called, "We're leaving!"  
"Leaving via _what?_ The magic warehouse portal to the dusty storeroom dimension?"  
Tails climbed over the wing of the Tornado and turned to offer Cream a hand, but she just flew over him to land in the back seat. Tails climbed into the pilot seat and allowed himself just a moment to run his hand over the plane's surface while he fired up the controls. Tock landed in Cream's lap with a digital squeal as the props fired up.  
"There better be an in-flight movie," he said.  
"There better be a _window_," Tails added, looking up, "Or else we're going nowhere."  
There was a window, and with some luck it would be wide enough to fly through without damage. Tails didn't waste time considering the alternative, considering it was the only option available.  
"Here we go! Hold on!"  
He heard the storm of feathers and wings as the Armada army arrived in the machine shop, and the Tornado began to roll. Tails bit his lip and squeezed the flight stick as they picked up speed. "Come on, come on, come on..."  
The Tornado took off just in time to avert a crash into the wall on the other side, and they rocketed toward the glass window, daylight shining through from outside.  
"_Cream, duck and shield your eyes!_"  
They both did, and the Tornado, itself protected by dozens of powerful upgrades that Tails had installed over the years, smashed through the window, showering them both in glass. Tails shook his head and roared with laughter.  
"Do you do that often?" Cream asked.  
Tails nodded. "Pretty often, yeah."  
"What exactly do you _do_ for a living?"  
"You'll see! Now, hold on to your stuff!"  
"_Yes, hold on to me!_" Tock exclaimed.  
The Tornado banked steeply and they turned to fly back over Quarantine. Tails bid it farewell, the cottages, the cobblestone streets, the lake and its ducks. The towers of Sanctuary passed by their left, and he waved to them as well. "So long, Babylon!"  
"_Tails! Look out!_"  
He looked ahead again just in time to see something big rise from beneath them and fly in a collision course with the Tornado. It was the bizarre black squid-thing, its tentacles trailing behind it as it rocketed ominously toward them, the hatch on the front that resembled a mouth gaping wide open.  
Tails pulled up hard, and the squid clamped its mouth shut on thin air as they flew over it in a barrel roll. But the squid was surprisingly aerodynamic, and it followed easily. They banked again, tried to get it off their tail.  
"We have to lose this thing," Tails said through clenched teeth. He cracked his knuckles, leaned forward in his seat, and grabbed the control stick. "Hold on."  
He used every flight trick he'd ever mastered to shake the beast machine off his tail, but it followed as though there were an invisible rope between them. Tails couldn't even figure out how the thing flew; it really did resemble a sea creature, swimming through the air. It opened its mouth and took another snap at them, which the plane narrowly avoided again.  
Just when Tails didn't think it could get any worse, he heard a loud bang to his right, and the whole plane shuddered. He looked and saw a row of tiny holes along the Tornado's side.  
"Oh _no_..."  
The Armada army fell upon them, flying in formation, and each bird appeared to have a machine gun mounted on his back. Tails looked at them, looked at the squid, and gritted his teeth. "This makes things more interesting."  
Lieutenant Overdraw rose from somewhere below, and flew beside Tails, his face hardened in a scowl.  
"You think you will get away in your stupid-looking contraption, yes?"  
"Yeah, as a matter of fact I do," Tails replied.  
"You can _not_ beat us in the sky, wretched animal," the Lieutenant growled, "The sky belongs to _us!_ It is our birthright, yes? You challenge the Armada in their own element?"  
"Oh, I _know_ how to fly, bird-brain."  
"_Hah!_ You know nothing. Hand over the rabbit now or you will go down in flames. This will be your only warning."  
"Shoot us down and we'll _both_ be killed. You call that a rescue?"  
"Ah, but we have had this conversation before, yes? I am not particularly fond of stinky _rabbits_ and filthy _vermin_ scampering about my home. If you were to decide to sacrifice yourselves I would lose no sleep, yes?"  
"Well, then. Eat my slipstream, Lieutenant."  
He banked the Tornado hard, and Overdraw was blown into a flurry of feathers. He squawked and dropped out of the sky.  
The rest of the Armada opened fire, and now Tails had their bullets to contend with. He rolled and dipped, banked and spun in a spectacular display of aeronautics. The birds knew how to fly, it was in their blood, but Tails knew he could do better. Because he knew that _nobody_ owned the sky. You could use it, but you were never its master. You could only befriend the sky, tame it, caress it, love it. Fall in love with it. Tails knew he could do better, because the Armada tried to whip the sky into submission, to dominate and control it. But Tails was in love with it.  
"What are you gonna do?" Cream squealed.  
"I'm gonna teach these birds how to fly," he replied, and banked the Tornado again.  
The giant squid-machine snapped at them from the left as it rolled past, and Tails grit his teeth as he pulled away from it and turned to fly back toward the Armada - a black arrow-shaped formation of birds, with Overdraw at its head. He flew directly toward them, and could see them train their guns on him.  
"Uh, Tails?" Cream stammered from the back seat.  
"Hold on." He looked around to check the position of the squid, then turned to the Armada. He leaned forward and stared directly into Overdraw's piercing eyes.  
"Tails, they'll _shoot_ us!"  
"Hold on."  
In a moment he would be in range of their guns, but he didn't bank away. He held his position, kept his eyes locked on the Lieutenant's. He turned to check on the squid again, checked his left and his right, then back to Overdraw. The bird was shouting something, either to Tails or his troops, but he couldn't hear it.  
The guns were trained. Cream hid her face in her hands. Tails gripped the flight stick and cried out something incomprehensible as the squid closed in on them from behind and opened its gaping mouth... Overdraw shouted his command and the Armada opened fire... and at the very last moment, the Tornado banked.  
What happened next was a marvel of harmonic unison. As the Tornado pulled away, the squid-machine following behind it clamped down, but it missed the plane. Instead it was Overdraw who flew, shrieking, straight into the beast's closing mouth. A muffled _clang_ from inside the thing and a cloud of black feathers were all that remained of the Lieutenant.  
At the very same moment, as the squid-thing flew over the formation of birds, the hail of bullets from the Armada shot it out of the sky.  
A massive explosion billowed behind the Tornado as Tails rolled and banked it away from the catastrophe. The birds peeled out and degenerated into a confused mess without their commander, and Tails took advantage of the chaos to make an escape over the ocean.  
Cream and Tock cheered from the back seat, and Tails tried to muffle his excited giggles and set a course with his instruments. He looked back as the Kitsune Atole vanished behind him, swallowed by sea and the horizon.  
"Man, I'm glad I don't wear pants!" Tock exclaimed, "And that I can't crap!"  
"Tails?" Cream said.  
"Yes, Cream?"  
"Do not ever do that again."

---

**10:00 am**

They called it the Forbidden Zone, but this was a good day to fly it. The sky was clear and the wind was steady and calm. A great day to fly.  
Cream had asked where they were going, and Tails hadn't needed to consider it. He knew the answer as though there had never been any question.  
"We're going home," he said, "A village in the forest called New Knothole."  
"That is a very strange name for a village."  
"Yeah, I guess it is."  
"Is it as nice as Quarantine?"  
"No."  
Cream nodded. "Good."  
Tails flew straight on toward the mainland of Westerica, navigating the familiar waters of his homeland. He'd flown over this water many times before, practicing his favourite hobby, doing barrel rolls and flips, just flying alone with the one he loved - the sky. His soulmate.  
And as the coast came into view, a tear formed in his eye and he wondered why he would ever want to leave the Freedom Fighters. Because freedom was only an illusion if there was no home to slouch back to at the end of the day, pointless if there was nobody to love and to love him in return. And there would be no freedom at all, without people to fight for it.  
He'd declared that their mission was not his own. And yet it was. Because the mission of the people he cared for _was_ his mission. He'd searched the world for his father, for catharsis, and yet he'd left his _real_ family behind in persuit of a quest, a promise he neither made nor understood.  
As it was, his father's last gift to him was to help him see what was important.  
Blood was thicker than water indeed, and Tails had spent enough time away from his family. As the big, beautiful blue sky marked his path, Tails Prower set his sights on home. And this _was_ the way it was supposed to end.

---

_Miles Prower, or _Tails_ as he liked to be called, skipped along the curb while his father walked beside him in the street. It was a fine day, the sky blue and beautiful with funny white pillows of cloud.  
"I like it here!" the little fox declared, "But _Station Square_ is a stupid name for a city!"  
"Well, I like it here too, Miles. And I guess it's not so silly once you get used to it."  
"It's not as nice as our _old_ home."  
"No. No, it isn't. Thank goodness."  
"Dad, look what I can do."  
"That's very clever, Miles."  
"Dad, what are we gonna do?"  
His father sighed. "Well, I guess first of all I have to look for a job."  
"Dad, you're not _watching_ me."  
"Yes I am. Very clever."  
"Dad, why have you gotta look for a _job?_"  
"Well, because that's how the world works. I need to-"  
"You didn't need a job on that dumb island. It was dumb there. It was boring, and it was dumb."  
"Things are different here, Miles. We'll have to try to fit in. You know, you'll have to look for work too, some day."  
"_No way!_"  
"Yes way. You'll find something you like to do, and you'll want to do it all the time."  
"I already know what I'm gonna do when I grow up."  
"Oh yeah? What's that?"  
"I'm gonna be a freedom fighter! Just like you!"  
His father smiled. "Oh, fighting for freedom is a tough job, Miles."  
"I don't care! I'm gonna be a freedom fighter! Or a fireman."  
His father ruffled his hair. "I have a feeling you're going to do just fine."  
"Dad, you messed up my _hair_. Are we there yet?"  
"Soon."  
"This is gonna be fun, Dad."  
"You know, I think you're right, kiddo. I think we're going to be all right."_


End file.
